The Power of Marketing Research
It’s
a big, bad market out there. There are hundreds and thousands of forces at
work, good and bad, affecting the success of your business. If you aren’t
aware and understand these forces success will be more difficult.
It
is crucial to research and analyze your market before you waste money on
advertising. Many business owners jump right into a new market with a new
product without having done the most basic marketing research. This lack of
preparation leads to bad decisions and great personal distress.
Essentially, conducting marketing research is about gathering as much
information as you need to make good decisions for your business. It’s the
systematic accumulation, recording, and analysis of data relevant to
marketing your product or service.
Performing your own market research is not difficult and does not need to
be costly. You can find a great deal of valuable research just by keeping
your eyes and ears open. Whey you talk with a client or supplier you
conducting marketing research. Likewise, when you are browsing the
internet, a newspaper, or watching TV you can be doing marketing research.
Research should be something you do everyday to move your marketing strategy
forward. To be a good marketing researcher, focus on these three areas:
your customer, your competition, and your market environment.
These three are inseparable when you make marketing decisions. Collect data
on all three constantly and analyze their influences on your strategy
through your tactics.
Conducting interviews and surveys to see how your target market thinks and
feels is an excellent way to gain marketing intelligence. A single piece of
marketing research can make a world of difference.
Database Marketing: The Nourishment For Your Business
A
healthy, well maintained database is a valuable asset to any business.
Collecting the names and information on your customers and prospects is a
worthwhile use of your time and energy.
Without a solid database marketing plan in place you will always struggle
for sale and profits. It’s that simple.
The
lifeblood of your operations are your clients and prospects. If you don’t
use your database to keep in touch with them, how are they going to know how
you can benefit their lives?
Database Marketing is a popular way to gather and store specific
information about your visitors, clients or prospects. Stored in a database
software program like Access, SQL, Excel, and MySQL, the useful information
is then used in advertising and marketing efforts, mainly to save time and
money by targeting your promotional efforts to your best prospects or
customers.
The type of information you collect for your database depends upon the
products and services you offer. Generally, the high the selling price, the
more information you would gather and use. A solid foundation generally
begins with contact and purchase information and birth date. Once
harvested, it’s time to put the information into action. And here are some
of the top database
marketing techniques that do just that.
1. Appended Data - More in-depth data may be desired for business to
business (B2B) communications like SIC code, number of employees and annual
sales, for bidding projects. Or for one-on-one relationships with clients
like for realtors and insurance products, people can append data to name and
address files, seeking out income, age, home value, length of residence,
number of children and over 30 other bits of info. The resulting data is
then used in all types of well targeted marketing campaigns. Appended data
can be done in-house or outsourced with larger companies that have more
complete databases.
2. Website Data – Some websites offer a means to gather their own
data, too, through the use of cookies that gather information from website
visitors. This marketing method is popular for allowing Internet marketers a
means to learn more about who visited their sites, which pages they searched
and for how long, and many other site statistics. These are then used for
their product and service creation, packaging and pricing.
3. Email Communications & Tracking – Email surveys, customer reply
forms and shipping documents that use tracking numbers and share them with
the clients are excellent examples of database marketers in action. By using
this type of tracking, companies can improve their customer-client
relationships,
resulting in increased sales and customer retention, and earn more about
their clients in the process for future sales and retention efforts.
In summary, by using Database Marketing and techniques tailored to fit your
own products and services, you can gather and store targeted information
about your visitors, clients or prospects. And you can save time and money
by targeting your promotional efforts to your best prospects or customers
with the information.
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