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Thread: Researching Your Market - How can you go about doing it?

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    Researching Your Market - How can you go about doing it?

    When it comes to deciding how you are going to take that idea you have and turn it into a profitable venture the first step to take is usually to do some research on potential clients/customers:

    Who is your ideal client/customer?

    What are their perceptions about your product/service you would like to provide?

    What does it do for them from their point of view?

    How can you increase the perceived value?

    How much are they prepared to pay for it?

    What is the best way to deliver it to them?

    Which media is the best to use to attract them?

    The surest way of getting the answers is to have a ready made product or prototype and to go cold calling on those that you think fit the profile of your ideal customer. You can also setup a website and then use pay per click advertising such as Google's Adwords or Facebook's Adverts to see what type of response their is to your idea.

    look at your closest competitors to see how they are doing things, then you can work out how you can do it a little more different or better so you can differentiate your business from theirs.

    A few ways you can do this would be to:

    Use Google and search for them online, visit the results.

    Browse their website if they have one.

    Become their client/customer.

    Collect their advertisements.

    From these you can begin to ask yourself:

    What exactly are they providing in terms of their value proposition how they are doing it?

    How will it impact on your business venture and how can you respond?

    What can you do better?

    How can you do it better?

    If you have any particular expertise on the subject of market research or have any experience with it that you would like to add please do... lets get the ideas flowing.

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    From the latest (this mornings) Petes weekly, ever current, ever interesting.

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    Business Owner Tactics




    When a Startup Goes Unexpected..
    September 10, 2015

    This is the story of what went wrong when I launched Best Suppliers a few weeks ago, and what happened next.

    At first glance a web directory to help small business owners find more prospects looked like a great idea. But a few "gotchas" happened along the way.

    The first problem with some of the early members was their existing web presence. Even though my team could give them a fine search engine optimised page on the directory, when a visitor clicked across to their current website it would be surreal. Their sites weren't fit to take enquiries. Most were old and tired and fugly. The sites, I mean.

    Online, absent any other way to judge a company, a reasonable website is crucial. But their websites conveyed the opposite.

    As I thought about this I looked deeply into what each of my clients was selling. 90% would get far more sales from email marketing than from search engine marketing.

    Most of us spend huge money to find strangers to sell to. And when we find them, whether we sell to them or not, we discard them and start looking for more strangers. That's crazy.

    On the same day that I was analysing this I received an email purporting to be from a firm in Durban.

    The email was so bad that I phoned the owner of that firm to tell him that his email had been hacked. No way could a real person have written it. It turned out that he had indeed sent it, and could not understand what he had done wrong.

    Mailchimp, his new email marketing service, had told him they would not use his existing list of 6000 email addresses. He must ask those people to "opt-in" to their new list.

    So he wrote an email and blasted it to 1900 people. He is now convinced that email marketing does not work because nobody in their right mind would have clicked on the link.

    And that got me to thinking about how complex email marketing can be when you start out. And how simple it is for me because I have been doing it for 15 years. And whether I could share my system with you.

    I began mapping out what would be needed to make a real difference to marketing for small business owners. To build a sustainable stream of incoming prospects, as well as the training needed to turn those prospects into clients.

    If you trust your clients there is so much more you can offer because it's not going to be abused. In 20 years of supporting small businesses I been hurt so few times that it's not worth worrying about.

    And that's when I realised how much I could offer if I wasn't scared.

    Last week I spoke to two women in Johannesburg. Each of whom had been ripped off with regard to their websites.

    One of them had paid more than R100,000 for a website. The other was paying R3000 per month for hosting, R3000 per month for search engine optimisation, and R3000 for Google advertising. All of which had produced no leads over the past three months.

    I realised how I could solve this problem of people not having a techie background from being lured into contracts that were very bad for them.

    Yesterday I recorded two videos. The first 6 minute video talks about the biggest challenge facing small business owners. The second (8 minutes) talks about my solution for you if you own a business.

    If you want to ace online marketing from now on, please check out the videos here.



    Warm regards

    Peter Carruthers


    http://www.businessheroes.academy/?i...ba2a2170072ae3
    "Nobody who has succeeded has not failed along the way"
    Arianna Huffington

    Read the first 10% of my books "Didymus" and "The BEAST of BIKO BRIDGE" for free
    You can also read and download 100% free my short stories "A Real Surprise" and "Pieces of Eight" at
    http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/332256

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    Thomas.D (10-Sep-15)

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