Hire a market researcher for free
Or, pay him or her a lavish salary. Either way, the market researcher is you.
Before now, we’ve never seen such powerful web-based research instruments freely and openly available to the general public. A generation ago, even at the big firms, you’d send people to sift through garbage looking for brand names on used wrappers (some still use this method today). Some contemporary methodologies still depend on people to fill out complicated diaries documenting every imaginable aspect of their consumer behavior — how often they go to the movies, what they like on their pizza, and so on. And large corporations would fork over huge sums of money for the account reps to package this data in nice graphs, all for the sake of justifying a new branding campaign.
I wonder what the small companies did? Maybe some of the research firms found a way to reach out to these folks, but it’s likely that many people running smaller businesses left market research to instinct, intuition, even common sense.
But again, times have changed. Case in point — here’s an excerpt from Robert Murray’s recent article entitled “Closing The Loop: How Search Can Inform Your Overall Marketing Decisions.” (This appeared on Brand Aid, another quality internet marketing column from Search Engine Land.)
During a meeting with a large consumer package goods company, we presented key search insights to the entire brand and marketing team. When we informed the client that two of the top referring keyword phrases to their site were “swirl marks” and “removing swirl marks,” the response was telling. One of the brand managers shot-up from his chair—as if a light bulb just went on—and exclaimed, “That”s amazing! We have the language all wrong! Here we are selling and promoting rubbing compounds in all of our marketing messaging, while our customers are looking for something that will remove swirl marks from the hood of their cars!”
Since that meeting, the company has launched a product called Swirl Mark Remover.
Simply put, a little keyword research can teach you a lot of what people in your target are actually looking for–and more importantly, how they articulate it. That’s what Murray’s message is all about.
A program like Google Analytics, free to anyone with under 5 million pageviews per month (are we there yet?) can then connect your keyword research to website traffic.
Add to this some intuitive tools for keyword research, and you’re halfway there. These are all freely available (at worst, you may have to register a new free account):
But then it gets a little more complicated. Do you know what your ideal keywords are? Hint - they may not be the ones showing up in your site content. And do you know which keywords of relevance to your site are the least competitive? Those are the ones for which you just might rise to a #1 ranking in Google.
The answers to these questions are not always as obvious as they may seem. That’s where an SEO expert can be very useful to you.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007 @ 5:17 pm on the category Marketing Theory, SEM, SEO, Small business.
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