How to Conduct Market Research on a Tight Budget

How to Conduct Market Research on a Tight Budget
by Meghan Keaney Anderson

You can learn a lot from product failures. In 1982, Toothpaste Brand Colgate decided it would expand its brand by launching Colgate Kitchen Entrees, frozen dinners for the busy consumer. In 2000, Heinz debuted a brand new ketchup -- it was purple. In 2005, Pen and Lighter maker Bic entered the market with a new line of disposable underwear for women. Finally, remember the infamous Gap Logo redesign of 2010? Each of these product marketing attempts failed for different reasons, but it's pretty safe to say that all of them could have benefited from better market research before getting rolled out to the public. 

When companies develop an idea, whether it's a new product or a redesigned website, marketing research is often the first thing cut due to time or resource restrictions. It's understandable. Working with marketing research firms can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. If you haven't done research before, it can be tempting to skip it and dive right into the development stage.

But the truth is, there's a lot of research you can do on your own and without much budget or training at all. Here are some low-budget ways to factor a research stage into your next project and give your product, idea, or designs much better footing. 

1) Interview Prospects and Customers

Cost: $0 - $50

Nothing is freer or more valuable than a conversation. We tried this ourselves a few weeks ago -- HubSpot invited four customers into our offices to join us for lunch and tell us what they thought of our software.

We were pleasantly surprised at how willing and forthcoming they were. Prompted by some questions, they gave us priceless insight into what's working for them and what's not in the HubSpot marketing platform. That one conversation spun off a handful of different projects that will make us better as a company.

You can't extrapolate public opinion from four individuals, but you can get a sense of which direction to pursue in future research or your product development. Building an ongoing message-testing program can take some time but it's entirely achievable. 

How to Set It Up:

How you set up your customer interviews will depend on the kind of company you are. If you are a software company with beta tests running, you can tap that beta group for interview subjects. If not, here are a few ways to find people to talk to:

• Take to social media: Ask for volunteers to join a conversation to help you shape the next iteration of your website, product or marketing. Tell them approximately how long the conversation will take and any qualifications you have (customer/non-customer, role or industry, etc). Offer a gift card or other reward as a thank you. You only need a handful of people to get worthwhile insights.
• Ask your customer-facing coworkers: If your company has account managers, support reps, or other staff who work closely with customers, ask them for recommendations of a few who might be willing to give feedback. 
• Include a link in customer communications: Whether it's a newsletter or an invoice, you can include a call-to-action to provide feedback through a short interview. Offer a small gift certificate or reward for participation. 

Questions to Ask:

You can customize your customer interviews however you want, but here's a list of common questions you can ask to help you nail your product positioning and understanding of the market, including ones like:

• What challenges stand in the way of getting your job done?
• What are your top three headaches right now?
• How would you describe this product to a boss or client? How would you describe it to your mother?
• What other types of [product category] have you tried? What were their strengths?
• In what situation would you recommend us over another company and visa versa?

2) Run a Content Strategy Survey

Cost: $0 -$50

Which is better: ebooks or webinars? Is it worth writing a 20-page ebook when a 3-page tip-sheet will suffice? What makes someone download or read a piece of content? Analytics can help you get at answers to some of these questions, but it's good to supplement that with direct feedback from your audience.

Every few quarters, HubSpot will run a content strategy survey to get a sense of what topics and formats interest our audience. What we've found is that our audiences is a living and evolving thing. Your interests change over time and we want to be right there to meet them.

How to Set It Up:

We teamed up with SurveyMonkey to create a content strategy survey that anyone can use. If you want to run a content strategy survey you can use our template to start and add in questions or tailor it to suit your needs.

In addition, if you use both SurveyMonkey and HubSpot you can actually create email segments based on the responses and serve up only the content that matters to each. Regardless of the survey tool you use, below are some of the questions we like to ask about our content strategy.

Questions to Ask:

• How often would you want to receive information from our company?
• When reading content from companies, which tone do you appreciate? (Select all that apply)
• When you share information about companies and the products or services they offer, which of the following do you use? (Select all that apply)
• In what format do you prefer to read your content? 

3) Run User Testing on Your Website

Cost: $0-$50

Whether you're heading into a redesign or maintaining your website through small tweaks, ongoing research into what's working and what's not can help you raise the productivity of your site. You can get a lot of information about your site performance from basic analytics about which pages are converting the best or garnering the most consistent traffic.

In addition to basic analytics though, there are some free and low-cost tools out there to help you run user testing on your website. These tests will get you feedback on more nuanced elements of your site -- things like the design, copy positioning, and/or layout are all great elements to test.

How to Set It Up:

There are a number of tools out there that you can use to get feedback on your designs or positioning. In the past we've used both UsabilityHub and UserTesting.com to help us test out assumptions on our site before a redesign or homepage refresh.

Questions to Ask: 

• What is the first thing you look at on this page?
• Where would you go first if you wanted to take the next step?
• Is this page trustworthy?
• How likely would you be to explore this site (rating scale)?
  

Small investments in market research can go a long way in your marketing. In addition to these basic approaches, there are a few tools you can use to research major shifts in buyer demographics or trends, including: 

1. FedStats: This site publishes government statistics, like statistical profiles of states, cities, and counties.
2. The Census Bureau: This site gives you access to census data.
3. The Census Bureau's Quick Facts: This site gives quick facts about people, businesses, and geography.

The moral of the story here is that market research doesn't have to be expensive or time consuming -- with the right tools, you can have get great insights in a short amount of time.

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Procella Consulting

How to boost your SEO ranking on Google

How to boost your SEO ranking on Google

By Jo Lynn Deal

Nearly ALL consumers search for businesses online (97%). Make sure you are online everywhere!

For any size business, one of the most important marketing goals is to gain a high organic search ranking with search engines. Our primary target is the mother of all search engines: Google. Recently, Search Engine Journal provided an in-depth look at the 200 algorithms Google uses for website ranking. It covers every thing from page load to image optimization to affiliate links. If you would like a warm up, below are key steps to get you started.

1. “Give in” to Google.  If you want to improve your Google search engine ranking, your first step should be to use their products. We’re very fortunate because their products are tailored to our needs and everything has been designed with us in mind. If you’ve been a late adopter of Google Plus, change that mentality. Create your Google Plus business page and begin making connections. Claim your link, set up a page that showcases your business, and verify your website. Add your Google Plus page as a channel on your editorial calendar. Learn why every business needs a Google+ page here.

2.  Claim your Google local page. Many people are concerned that setting up a Google Plus Local page limits them to only appear in searches specific to their local zip code. That’s actually not true. Your content will appear when it is relevant to the search terms, regardless of where you are located. However, if you set up a Google Plus Local page, you gain ranking with local searches.

If you are still worried, clarify your service area in the information on your website. Share about the many businesses and locations you have served in your testimonial page, about us page, contact us page, and website homepage. Add a simple statement like “we serve clients all over the world from beautiful downtown Chicago.” If your business has several locations, you also have the option to list them.  To learn how to set up a Google Plus Local page click here.

3.  Claim Google Authorship. If you or anyone one your team writes for the company blog, create authorship for every contributor and link their Google Plus profile to your website.

4. Optimize your digital channels with industry keywords.  Your website and all of your social media channels should include similar descriptions in the About Us sections, with links back to your primary website. These sections should be written using relevant industry keywords about you and your business. This can be tricky because we want our descriptions to be what we want our customers to know about us, but they also need to include the terms our customers are searching. One of the best tools is of course offered by Google and it is through the Adwords program. Anyone can set up an Adwords account and use the Keyword Planner found in the menu bar under Tools.

5. Write for your audience, edit for search engines. For both your web pages and your business blog, optimize each page for search engines. Here is a FREE SEO guide (excerpt) that you can keep handy on your desk to use when you finish a post or page.

6.  Add your business to local directories.  If you want people to find you, tell them where you are. Hubspot recently shared a listing of 70 local business directories you can submit your website and company information to. Submitting your information to these local directories is key to your local marketing plan.

7. Use channels that offer highly searched content.  Videos and images are the most highly shared content online, therefore, they are also most likely to appear in searches.  Many small businesses may struggle with how to use video with their marketing efforts, but there are many, many creative ways you can use this important channel. Use videos for customer testimonials, customer interviews, company updates, sharing good wishes during the holidays, host a video contest and curate videos from your customers, create a FAQ page with video recordings of the questions and your team answering. Think about every way you communicate through your business and ask yourself if there is a way to use a video. Follow the same process with images.

Would you benefit from an SEO overhaul or maybe a more glamorous “Makeover” for your website? We offer services that are below budget and above expectations! Click here to request an appointment. 

Is your marketing strategy old school?

Is your Marketing Strategy old school?

By Julie Niehoff, director of education and development at Constant Contact

There you are, with hundreds of Facebook fans, earning tons of retweets, and building an email opt-in subscriber list that’s starting to look like the local phone book. From all outward appearances, you’ve mastered email and social media marketing.

Or have you? Even if you’re just getting familiar with the tools, experts and newbies alike may want to do a reality check on how current their marketing approach is.

If you don’t have enough time to finish your to-do list, are scratching your head for ideas on what to post next, or are deciding which social media channel to nix so you can get your life back, you may be stuck in old-school marketing. And it’s costing you a boatload of time and money. But you’re not alone.

According to a recent survey by Constant Contact, the top two marketing concerns facing entrepreneurs today are making marketing dollars go further (59 percent) and selecting the best marketing campaigns to run (56 percent). While these problems aren’t new, how they’re being solved is. Enter multi-channel marketing.

Multi-channel marketing uses a variety of tools such as email, social media, mobile, and the Web to get your message out to the right audience. Instead of the time-consuming process of promoting a single product or event, you market a campaign and execute it through select channels that allow you to maximize your presence in the most efficient way possible.

For example, let’s say you own a sporting goods store. Your campaign could ask fans to vote on their favorite sport and say why it’s so great. In exchange, they’re entered into a drawing to win new equipment for that sport.

The campaign could include a promotion of the sweepstakes by email and then point subscribers to your Facebook page. If they’re not already fans, they soon will be. When they like your page and cast their vote, their network of friends will also know about your contest. Your tweets can feature the contest, the Top 3 contenders during the voting period, and reminders for followers to enter to win. And great images on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram will attract new followers and inspire more entrants to the contest.

Does multi-channel marketing work? About 82 percent of the survey participants that have adopted multi-channel marketing report an uptick in new customers, stronger engagement with existing customers, and more revenue. Here’s how to do it.

1. Whip up a great campaign

It doesn’t need to be time consuming or involve The Flying Wallendas, though it does need to demonstrate your expertise and show what makes your business unique.

Since your campaign is going to drive all of your content, every message should be about the needs and interests of your customers. Nobody likes a barrage of overt promotions. Remember that customers buy, and buy more, from businesses they know and trust and will actually pay more if they believe they’re getting a greater value from the experience.

2. Go deep, not wide
Find out where your active customers prefer to engage and focus your efforts there. Some like Facebook, others may be strictly email, and others enjoy face-to-face interactions, although it’s likely they’re using a combination of these communications channels. Instead of having a surface presence in a lot of places, focus on two or three channels where you can make an impact.

3. Think big by starting small

At first it’s best to tackle only a few channels, such as sending out an email with a link to the campaign’s Facebook page and then add in more channels when you’re ready. You’ll find that the more proficient you become with each channel, the easier it is to extend your campaign to new ones. Since you’ll be staggering your marketing efforts across various channels on different days, this allows you to keep your day job.

4. Be a mad scientist

Experiment with different ideas, and if they’re not all homeruns, it’s still okay. You’ll learn more about what works through experimentation and failure, so allow yourself a few mulligans along the way.

5. Slice and dice your content

You can save lots of time and reinforce your campaign messages by cleverly re-using your content. Just be sure to always put a fresh twist on them.

6. Use short-cut tools

There are lots of tools available that make it easier for you to manage your various profiles on different social networks, schedule when your messages go live, and manage all of your campaigns in one place. These tools also are a great way to reduce your learning curve, so why not check out Hootsuite for Twitter and the Constant Contact Toolkit for managing your marketing activities?

If you really want to drive business, it’s time to ditch old school marketing and adopt multi-channel. Be sure to email us at procellaconsultants@gmail.com or call us now at 956-454-2851 to set up an appointment! We will pull you out of old school and into the new!

Social Media Giant Spills Secrets

You heard right! The Social Media Strategist of Dell (yes, the big computer giant) is opening his doors this Friday!

Dell is offering a free presentation by their head social media straightest Adam Price on how he does what he does. Afterwards is another great freebie- a tour of their social media command center!

All of this is Friday May 30th from 11:45 AM until 1:45 PM and this is a one time only event!

The place to be is Dell's Round Rock, Texas location at Building 1 (Dell Inc, 1 Dell Way, Round Rock, TX 78682)

If you want to register for this FREE event just click here and see the official Facebook event here!

WE'RE BACK!!!

Yeah, we took a bit of a long break. But don't worry, it was just so we could grow and move towards bigger and better things!

Now all we have to do is break the big news.....

WE'RE NOW IN AUSTIN TEXAS!

Yup, that's right. We are now based in the new huge bustling capital of Texas! While we settle in and get used to the place, we're going to be updating a lot of new great things!

For one, we have new and better service's to help you, a big new degree to back up our talk, and more partners to work with you!

Get ready Austin, the business revolution is here!

The Three Factors That Determine Affiliate Marketing Success

By Michael Johnston

As affiliate marketing has become a multi-billion dollar industry over the past several years, it’s also become increasingly sophisticated. Across the seemingly endless niches are a variety of strategies for generating revenue. With more merchants, offers, and analytics, there’s a lot to the affiliate marketing business.

But while the details have grown increasingly complex, the big picture remains incredibly simple. Success in affiliate marketing ultimately depends on how well you execute three tasks.

Affiliate Marketing For Dummies

If you’re an affiliate marketer, you have a chance to make money every time someone opens up a Web browser. To the affiliate marketer, below is a diagram of how the flow of every Internet engagement unfolds.

You make money on the path that includes three green boxes; on all others–the vast majority of scenarios–you get nothing. So at its simplest, affiliate marketing success comes to those who maximize the number of positive outcomes down the flow chart above.

Three Key Factors

Put another way, think of affiliate marketing as this formula:

Revenue = Visitors x Click Rate x Conversion Rate x Commission

Improving any one of the variables on the right side of this equation will increase the dollar amount on the left side. So affiliate marketing really boils down to optimizing three factors:

Factor #1: Visitors / Traffic

In order to make money from affiliate marketing, you need to convert a visitor to your site to a paying customer for your merchant partner(s). Obviously, the more visitors you have (i.e., the greater the traffic to your site), the more chances you have to make an affiliate referral.

Building up a large base of traffic is in itself a huge challenge. There’s an overwhelming amount of content on the Web dedicated to attracting visitors to your website, and we won’t go into any detail on the topic here. (Check out SEOmoz or Search Engine Land if you really want to read more).

If your website doesn’t have much traffic to speak of, there’s probably not a big opportunity for you now in affiliate marketing. Focus on producing high quality content, building some links, and getting a recurring stream of visitors to your site. But ff you have a website that is already attracting a significant number of visitors from referring sites, organic search, and direct visits, affiliate marketing could be a logical way to monetize.

Factor #2: Click Rate

This is where we put the “marketing” in affiliate marketing. It’s up to you as the affiliate marketer to make sure that your audience sees the affiliate links and offers you have on your site. You can’t simply throw them into the right sidebar and hope that your audience seeks them out and clicks on them. There’s a great deal that you can do to increase the likelihood that your visitors click on the links and get in front of the affiliate offer.

This topic is extremely broad; there are countless strategies for increasing visibility (and ultimately click rate) on your affiliate links, ranging from incorporating links into your content to sending emails to your newsletter list. Check out some of the affiliate marketing gurus on our Best Monetization Blogs overview for an extensive supply of tips and tricks for boosting the number of clicks your affiliate links receive.

Factor #3: Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the percentage of referrals sent who ultimately complete the desired action (e.g., purchase something from Amazon).

This is one area that is often overlooked as an “out of my hands” part of the affiliate marketing funnel. Once you’ve sent a visitor to the merchant site, all you can do is cross your fingers and hope they ultimately complete whatever action is necessary for you to get your commission. That’s partially true I suppose. But you have more input here than you may realize.

Part of the affiliate marketing game involves picking out merchant partners and products to promote. If you’re promoting a crap product, you can probably send some traffic through the affiliate link by doing a good job of marketing it to your audience. But once they get to the merchant site and are disappointed in what they see, they’re probably going to abandon.

If you’re promoting a quality product that you think delivers great value to your audience, they’re much more likely to complete the purchase once they’ve clicked.

Commission $ vs. Conversion %

There’s often a trade-off between the quality of a product and the commission being offered. And it’s tempting to gravitate toward the partners and products that pay you the most per conversion. But if those products are unlikely to convert, they might not be the best fit.

Consider two products:

• Product A: $100 commission to affiliates
• Product B: $25 commission to affiliates

Product A looks like the winner, right? Not necessarily; your expected revenue from promoting this product depends on the likelihood of conversion. Suppose the conversion rates look like this:

• Product A: 1%
• Product B: 5%

For each affiliate click you send to Product A, you can expect $1.00 in revenue. For each sent to Product B, you can expect $1.25 in affiliate revenue.

Don’t get blinded by simply commissions. Finding relevant, quality products to promote is one of the most important parts of the affiliate business.

Bottom Line

Focusing on any one of these areas increases your chances of affiliate marketing success. But optimizing one area when another is sub-optimal won’t deliver the results you want. In other words, the real success and revenue comes when all three are executed successfully.

For example, building up a big base of traffic won’t deliver much of a reward if you’re working with the wrong affiliate offers. Similarly, doing a great job marketing the ideal offers to an extremely small traffic base won’t translate into much revenue. Each of these three points must be implemented and improved together, or else you won’t see results.

There’s obviously a lot of work that goes into each of the three points above; building up substantial traffic takes months (or even years) of effort, and finding the right affiliates involves never-ending research.