The Five Keys To Understanding Your Market
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 04:53PM Making your business as successful as possible means getting to know as much as possible about what is on your customers’ minds.
Let’s look at five different ways to can get access to the information you need to find out what your market is really thinking.
The best way to find out about your customers will vary depending on whether your business already has lots of customers.
1. Existing customers: Conduct a survey of your own customers and find out about their worries and problems. Your aim here is not to be asking them what they want. You want to know what’s on their mind. What keeps them awake at night?
2. Google searches: These days, the first place many people go for information about any topic is internet search engines such as Google. Just entering a few words related to the topic - known as ‘keywords’ - will give you a huge amount of information about your marketplace. Don’t get too bogged down at this stage on thinking about the exact keywords - take into account what people would enter in if they were searching for information on the subject and see what shows. Try to be as specific as possible in the words that you use.
3. Social media: The explosion of social media has opened up access to a great deal of information about many markets. This includes social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, micro-blogging services such as Twitter, online forums and social bookmarking sites such as Digg and StumbleUpon.
4. Competitors: One of the best ways of finding out about your market is to check out your competition - what they are selling, how much they are charging and how they do their marketing. Your competition will show up when you carry out an online search - both in the natural search and in the ads that come up along the top and down the right of the search page.
5. News - online and offline: Keeping track of the news is a good way of finding out about the current concerns of your marketplace. Offline media such as specialist newspapers and magazines, local newspapers and TV news can tell you a lot about current trends. You can set up a Google Alerts at
www.google.com/alerts to receive regular email updates on your topic of interest.
All these methods of research will help you get to know your market better.
When you have a good understanding of the people in your market - and what they want - you are well positioned to help more people and make more money.
About the Author:
Robert Greenshields helps consultants, coaches and other independent professionals attract more clients and make more profit by packaging and promoting their expertise as a high-value product. Download his free Productize Your Expertise report at http://www.mindpowermarketing.com
Reader Comments (1)
The irony of this economic downturn is that there are more people than ever on the job market. As an executive recruiter, your job is to find them, assess them, and then sell them on your client’s opportunity. And for the most part, you're very good at those last two parts. You know a solid candidate when you see one, and you're very good at selling them on your client’s opportunity. Your strength is in building relationships, assessing professional and personal qualities, and helping companies meet their organizational needs.
You're a people person.
But finding those people is often time-consuming and tedious. It's even harder in an economic downturn, when the unemployment rolls are flooded with people -- some qualified, some not -- looking for work. Separating the wheat from the chaff – fighting the temptation to settle for the most available as opposed to the most qualified -- gets harder in times like these.
Frankly, it can be a waste of your time. Why spend time making cold calls to passive candidates and weeding through tons of unemployed job seekers when you could be closing searches and developing new clients.
So consider outsourcing this phase of the process to a company that specializes in research. These firms, also called research recruiting firms, executive search research firms, candidate sourcing firms or name generation firms, know your time is better spent meeting candidates and working with clients.
Imagine this: Your company is hiring an executive vice president of sales. You pick up the phone and call a firm like Lakeview Research and tell them you need a list of names, titles and phone numbers of people who currently hold that position at all the major competitors to your client.
Voila! A highly targeted, personalized list is in your hands in three days. You only pay for names that are actually generated and it's far more economical than taking out ads in classified sections or searching through job-hunt websites. And instead of sorting through stacks of resumes from people with no relevant experience, you have a blueprint for the next steps in your executive recruiting process.
You can even go one step further and ask them to find the hiring authority in your client’s competitor companies so you can use them for business development -- compounding the value of your research or take hard searches that you have completed and have your candidate generation firms find the decision maker creating the opportunity for new business where you already have search credibility and resources.
You know the quicker you fill searches, with hard to find quality candidates the more searches you will get from a client and the more fees come from pitching new clients than begging gate keepers for names.