Marketing research distinguishes successful business owners from the rest. And Internet marketers are no exception.

The most successful business owners, on-line and off line, learn what is most effective and efficient for their businesses. They do this learning by either direct observation, market segmentation or some other marketing research.

Now if you’re an Internet marketer or other small business owner, don’t tune me out here. I AM talking to you. Marketing research isn’t limited to large companies.

You May Be Doing Marketing Research If …

If you’re not doing any of these types of research, ask yourself if you want to be successful enough to do what most successful business owners do.

If you need help, Redshift provides clear and incisive business and consumer market research and data analysis.

A Marketing Research Demonstration

On Friday, I demonstrated how simple marketing research can be with my first monthly Entrecard statistics analysis. I’ll be posting these statistics monthly until the statistics show me that Entrecard doesn’t provide enough return on investment to continue doing it.

More Marketing Research Coming Soon!

I’ll also be reporting, on this blog, other statistics and analysis that I’m doing in my business. If you follow my posts, you’ll see how simple and informative marketing research can be. You can easily follow my posts my subscribing to my RSS feed. Just click the RSS button in the upper right sidebar.

To read about email marketing for Internet marketers, click the link below:

Market Segmentation And E-Mail Marketing

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Posted 8-4-08: Marketing Research: How Do Internet Marketers Do It?

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If you’re an Internet marketer, you need to know your target market. But this can be especially difficult for Internet marketers.Market segmentation can give you vital information about your target market.

Trying to market on the Internet without knowing who your target market members are, is like shooting blindfolded with a bouncing target.

Unfortunately, many Internet marketers depend totally on keywords without trying to discover anything about the people who use those keywords.

I call that marketing madness because it just throws time and money at marketing with little return on investment.

What Do You Know About Your Target Market?

The easiest way to work with a target market is to target a market like yourself. You already know how you react, and many of those reactions can be generalized to others like you.

The problem comes when your target market is not like you. This is often the case today if you, like many Internet marketers, select a niche based on the number of searches for a keyword and the number of competing sites.

How do you know how target market member’s in these niches will react?
How do you know the best appeals to reach them?
How do you know how to focus your Web site or blog to appeal to them?

You must conduct research.

What Type of Market Research Do You Do?

As an Internet marketer if you want to succeed online, good market research is vital.

Keyword research, monitoring forums and groups, and talking to people are important first steps, but are not enough. Once you’ve learned demographics from these types of research, you can use those demographics to discover much more about your target market, by using market segmentation.

Market segmentation provides a way of using demographic information to determine psychographic, sociographic and behavioral characteristics that enable you to discover the best appeals for your target market.

You can read about the role of gender in internet marketing.

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Posted 7-28-08: Internet Marketers Need To Know Their Target Markets

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Do you usemarket segmentation? If you’re an Internet marketer, you probably don’t. More off line business owners use market segmentation than do Internet Marketers. Why?

One reason is because Internet marketers often target markets by key words and phrases and don’t know the demographic characteristics of the people who search for those key words.

Internet Marketers Need Demographic Information On Their Target Markets

If you’re an Internet marketer, you may not know enough demographic information about the people using your key words to utilize market segmentation. But if you learn, you can improve your marketing and increase your sales. And it’s not that hard.

Getting demographic information about your target markets requires some research and will likely cost you some time and/or money. But the results of market segmentation are worth it.

The simplest way to learn the demographics of your target market is to survey its members.

If you’ve already built a good list, it will be easier and cheaper to conduct research and determine your target market’s demographics than if you have to advertise for people to take your survey. So you can relatively easily and inexpensively utilize market segmentation with a list.

How To Get Demographic Information On Your Target Market

To conduct demographic research for the people who use your key words, you first need to have something to offer them in return for providing you with their information. Digital information products work well because you can deliver them instantly for no delivery charge.

How To Get Demographic Information Through Pay Per Click

If you don’t have a good list, then you will have to use pay-per-click. You can get people who search for your key words to click on your advertisement and trade their demographics for your free digital product. That is if your product is something they want enough to exchange their contact information for it.

Pay-per-click advertising can be costly, and it may not reach the same people who click on organic search results for your key words. I recently read research indicating that the people who click on pay-per-click ads are usually younger and less likely to purchase a product than people who click on organic search results. They comprise two different segments so getting information on clickers to use for searchers can distort your market segmentation research.

How To Get Demographic Information Through Forums

You may get less distorted information by joining forums that your target market members are likely to join and post your proposal there.

Whichever, technique you use to get demographic information on your target market, you have to have that information before you can use market segmentation to get personality characteristics and buying behavior.

The next post in this series will guide you to get demographic information with surveys. Then you can use information from the surveys to get even more information on your target market using market segmentation. You can access that post below:

Market Segmentation For Internet Marketers 2

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Posted 6-25-08: Market Segmentation
For Internet Marketers 1

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