Market Research Is Essential To The Success Of Your Business

Whether you run a brick and mortar store or a virtual store on your own website the one battle every one fights is trying to attract potential customers and then convincing them to buy from you rather than a competitor. So how does one go about accomplishing this? Market Research. In fact market research is essential to the success of your business!

How you can possibly target a market if you don’t know who that market is? And if you believe you can just target everybody and manage to attract enough of the right people you are sadly wrong and you will fail.

Targeting your market can be much simpler in a brick and mortar store because you choose the location based on where you believe your traffic will be. You may only have a dozen or so competitors in your neighborhood or possibly in your city depending on what your sell.

On the web it’s a whole different ball game or should we say marketing game. Your competition could easily be in the millions and you are all fighting for the same potential consumer. Much of this fighting occurs through the use of targeted keywords but it can be a long and difficult battle to get your site positioned so that it appears in the first few pages of a web search. Because anything farther down nobody looks at!

The first thing you need to do is conduct your market research. So where you do this and how? Questionnaires work well and so do focus groups. Both are able to qualify and quantify factors both visually and verbally. However you must be sure of their reliability.

A focus group is made up of participant that’s answers may be affected by other members in the group. And a questionnaires results may be influenced by the wording of the question.

There are actually other methods that are more effective and will result in less biased data. These methods use the internet to collect accurate date in a timely manner.

The internet has actually changed the entire market research dynamics. Each day over 50,000 new websites appear online. Yes that’s each and every day! All languages and cultures are showing continuous growth. So what a perfect place to do your market research. It’s very cheap to accomplish, it provides anonymity to the individual, and it’s very insightful.

Every day there are more than 500 million searches that are conducted online on search engines like Google, MSN, Yahoo, and Alexia. Visitors’ type in keywords and phrases in an attempt to find the information they are looking for. And this is where your marketing research data lies.

Marketing online is directly tied to keywords. In order to be found and rate well you must search engine optimize your sight for keywords that are related and important to your site. Doing this will result in targeted visitors which are potential customers and thus should result in an increase in sales and revenues.

Online research is responsible for 75% of offline sales. That means 75% of the people that use the internet do their research online and then go shop in a traditional brick and mortar store. But that also means 25% shop online! And 25% on the internet is a lot of potential customers.

Once you have targeted your market, found your optimum keywords, and succeeded in getting your site sitting well in the search engines you should consider working on branding. Branding increases your profile and consumer recognition. In fact research shows that consumers tend to shop where they have brand recognition and they tend to build loyalty to sites that are easy to remember and identify. Rather like the big “M” for McDonald’s that everyone around the world recognizes.

In order for your website to be successful you must use market research data to determine who your customer is, where they are coming from, and what they are looking for. Once you establish their desires through research you will be in a much better position to compete with other websites selling similar or same products.

So have you done your market research? Isn’t it time to get busy? Your reward will be increased revenues.

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.