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Twitter is one of the “new kids on the block” in the Social Media or Web 2.0 world. It has some fantastic social aspects and if used correctly it can be a great tool. You can use Twitter for market research, which should be one of your core internet marketing strategies. The best thing about using Twitter is you get the research done quickly-and for free!

Broad audience

One of the best aspects of Twitter from a marketing perspective is the broad reach you have. You can touch millions of people around the world. At any given moment there are literally millions of people twittering away.

You put a tweet out to the Twitterverse…asking a question and you will get short, spontaneous answers…these tend to be direct and not calculated because they are spontaneous. The Tweeple don’t take time to think about their answers…tweets are flying by too quickly for that…so they just answer!

You can either put out the questions manually as in “What is your favorite flavor ice cream?” or you could use one of the applications and create a poll or survey giving them specific choices.

After you get your initial results, you can even tweet the outcome giving people a chance to respond and further refine or clarify your research!

Eaves dropping

You can also conduct market research by listening in on other people’s tweets. You can find out for free what people are buzzing about, what they are looking for, problems they are encountering, solutions they wish they could find…or just info they are seeking.

Twitter has a search function built in so you can find people talking about a specific subject. You can also use different search applications to find comments. The hashtag is a popular way for people to identify a topic they are interested in.

So if I want to find out what people are talking about regarding ice cream, I could type “ice cream” in the search box, or “#icecream”. The # will return tweets by people who have put that exact phrase #icecream in their tweet.

So I could ask my question so I catch both groups-”what is your favorite ice cream flavor? #icecream” And I still have 91 characters left!

By getting this input, you can then direct your next project to solve a problem that you know exists! This is one of the classic offline and internet marketing strategies: find a need and fill it! This research might lead you to promote a different product than you had originally intended. Or maybe it gives you clues on how to write the sales copy to make your product more appealing. It might inspire you to create a new product or improve an existing product-or to provide a service that fills a need.

Learn fast act fast

Another one of my internet marketing strategies is acting while a market is hot and Twitter really helps here! Because you got the research quickly, you can also act upon it quickly.

So by using social media, specifically Twitter, you are able to implement at least three of your internet marketing strategies-market research, filling a need and acting quickly.

Tellman Knudson is CEO of Overcome Everything. He and his team at The Listbuilding Club are passionate about teaching others the ins and outs of list building and other internet marketing strategies. To learn more about using Social Media in your internet marketing business, visit http://ListSpeed.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Tellman_Knudson

http://EzineArticles.com/?Internet-Marketing-Strategies—Conduct-Market-Research-Quickly-Using-Twitter&id=2285537

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Technorati Tags: hashtag, market research, marketing, search, Twitter

By Zachary Wilson

1. Not knowing what you don’t know
Its easy to do online surveys these days. Too easy. It may be so cheap and easy that you do it without understanding the basics and end up with misleading answers that send your business down the wrong path. This is worse than never doing any research in the first place. Spend a little time and get to know what you don’t know about market research. A basic review of the following topics is a great start.

• Sampling and sampling error
• Quantitative vs. qualitative research
• Question bias / question design
• Response rates / confidence levels
• Questionnaire coding
• Why people take surveys (social contract)

Some great books on these subjects are:
“Mail and Internet Surveys: The Tailored Design Method” by Don A. Dillman
“Asking Questions: A Definitive Guide to Questionnaire Design” by Norman Bradburn, Seymour Sudman, Brian Wansink

2. Not eliminating sampling errors
Now that you know what sampling error is you can understand why it is critical to conducting meaningful market research. Many of the online surveys you see today are full of potential sampling errors. Don’t be one of them. Take the time to develop a good sample and then make sure you get as many of those people as possible to your survey. This is probably the biggest difference between professional market research and your do-it-yourselfers. The pros take the time and money to develop good samples and then make sure that they get good response rates. You can to if you put in the effort.

• Always use a true random sample
• Tracking your respondents (PINs)
• Program the survey to eliminate duplicates and respondents with bad intentions
• Check the data for oddities (clean the data of illegitimate records)
• Use incentives (does not have to be monetary, see social contract)

3. Making decisions with inaccurate information
If you never understood any of # 1 and # 2 it is a good bet your survey is useless. Worse than that you may think it is telling you what to do with your important business decisions. Making decisions with inaccurate information is worse than taking a guess.

4. Writing bad questionnaires
You might get everything else right and then go and write a bad questionnaire. Lots of online surveys have at least one bad question. What is a bad question? It’s any of the following:

• Biased questions
• Unanswerable questions (impossible to know the answer)
• Questions with two meanings
• Hard to understand questions (way to long, strange use of words)
• Dumb questions (asking about something the researcher should already know, or has already asked)

5. Programming a hard to take survey
After you have spent all that time creating a good sample and writing good questions don’t ruin it by programming a hard to use survey. One of my top gripes is forcing respondents to complete every answer. Too much of this is going to get you either a contrived answer or the respondent leaving. Neither is good.

• Don’t force non-critical questions
• Don’t have non-standard buttons
• Don’t use non-standard technologies (java applets, etc.)

6. Going cheap
Both the good and bad thing about online market research is that it can be much less expensive than in the past. The bad of this is that it is just too easy to conduct flawed market research. Many of the above items cost time and money (sampling, questionnaire design, etc.) Spend the time and money to do it right. Even better hire a quality market research firm to do it for you. Either way you will save money in the long run by conducting quality market research.

7. Confusing social networking with quantitative market research
Talking with lots of people (social networking) might gain you valuable qualitative information but it is not quantitative market research. The difference is qualitative information rarely represents all of your audience and gives you individual opinions and ideas. Quantitative research on the other hand is designed to represent all of your audience and gives you answers that you can know reflects all of your customers. Don’t confuse the two. Social networking can be useful but understand its limitations.

8. Being overly “cute” with the survey tool
Your market research is supposed to gather meaningful information about your target audience. It is not supposed to impress them with all the high technology you can master. Keep your survey technology as simple as possible to reduce excluding respondents that are not up to speed with the latest and greatest.

• Keep Flash and JavaScript to a minimum (use them but not in critical areas, always provide alternatives.)
• Use tried and true web technologies

9. Relying on only one source of information
Market research is a snapshot of opinions at a certain time. If your research results in wildly different answers than you were anticipating it is wise to confirm these conclusions with more data.

• Conduct another survey
• Look for corroborating data

10. Ignoring your market research
If you go to all the trouble to conduct a good study then have a plan to do something with that information. Too many organizations will conduct market research for one reason or another and when they get information back just sit on it. Don’t be the one who ends up saying “Wow, if we had just done what our market research told us we wouldn’t be in this bad position”. Before you conduct any online research have a plan as to what you will do with it.

Zachary Wilson is Vice President and Web Manager of Wilson Research Group (a small Silicon Valley market research firm) and has been conducting online surveys for over 10 years. This article targets those who are not market research professionals but want to conduct professional surveys.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Zach_Wilson
http://EzineArticles.com/?Top-10-Mistakes-in-Conducting-Online-Market-Research&id=2552698

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Technorati Tags: market research, Qualitative research, Quantitative research

Here’s a short video that discusses the importance of surveying your customers as part of an overall market research strategy.

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Technorati Tags: market research, marketing, Online Surveys, research

Image by kansasexplorer 3128 via Flickr

By Scott Spooner

Do you remember the days when “niche marketing” meant researching a market to find the sub-markets, or “niches” of people that had common likes, wants, needs, or traits? Those were the days. You could identify a group of people and market directly to them through time-tested channels.

It’s not so easy anymore. Today, successful niche marketers not only have to identify the niche market, but also they have to decide where that niche hangs out, and how best to reach them.

Web sites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other competing social media sites all clamor for the attention of our prospects. Add to that the endless possibilities of “mobile marketing” through the ever expanding variety of smart phones and mobile devices.

Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook have taken notice. So has Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

You may feel overwhelmed by all of these choices, but one thing will always hold true: research is the key to understanding and reaching your market. Do your homework. Study your market. Stay away from chasing the big hit, and rely instead on building a solid relationship with your customer base.

Like Dorothy, we may not be in Kansas anymore, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find our way back home.

Tell me what you think about the changes in niche marketing.

******

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Technorati Tags: market research, niche marketing, social media

In this Snowcast ( http://snowcaplabs.com/blog ) Loren demonstrates some simple techniques to finding “keyword seeds” and expand them to get hundreds (or thousands) of keywords relevant to a given market niche.

Using freely available tools, such as the excellent (and free!) Keyword Tool available from SEOBook (http://seobook.com), we see just how easy it is to learn a lot about the web traffic available to your markets.

For more web marketing screencasts, advice, and consulting, check out http://snowcaplabs.com

Duration : 0:9:58

Technorati Tags: keywords, market research, niche marketing tools, niche markets

by Scott Spooner

If you are interested in finding a niche market, you can turn to any of dozens of articles, blog posts, and forum threads that discuss the topic in length. Unfortunately, most of these writings are theoretical in nature; defining what a niche market is, or advising you to find that delicate balance between enough traffic and limited competition to make it profitable.

As a full-time niche marketer, the bulk of the writing that exists today leaves me somewhat frustrated as so little of it points to any metrics, or “rules of thumb”, for defining what is “enough traffic”, or “limited competition”.

To address this issue head on, this article will specify the numbers that I use when I am considering a niche to explore. I will also describe the tools I use to determine these numbers. The best part is, these tools are free.

Let’s start with “traffic”. Traffic is usually described in terms of the number of searches performed through any of several search engines. Because of its current dominance on the Internet, Google is usually the “go to” search engine that is used for search traffic counts, so that is where we’ll start.

Google has a free keyword too, which you can locate by going to Google and typing in “Google keyword tool”. Although this tool was designed for use with Google’s AdWords program, anybody can use it free of charge.

Simply enter in one or more keywords from niches that you are interested in, fill out the “captcha”, and click on the “Get keyword ideas” button. Google will then compile the data and report back to you both related keywords and monthly search volume counts (among other data available).

Here is where I look for the first of my two metrics. I am searching for niche-related keywords that show at least 2500 searches per month (or, approximately 80 searches per day, if you are using a keyword tool that displays daily search counts).

Ok, now we have a specific search traffic number that we can use for selecting our keywords. But, what about the other side of the equation, the “limited competition”? What kind of metric can we use to determine how much competition is too much?

Like with traffic, there are many ways to size up your competition. Some authors use “strength of competition” (SOC), while others prefer measures of “authority”. Still others use Google’s own measure of Page Rank (PR). For purposes of this article, I’ll focus on Page Rank for two reasons: 1) it is a simple measure that is widely used, and; 2) I’ve got a free tool you can use to measure it.

The tool is named “SEO for Firefox” and, like the name implies, it works with the Firefox browser. You can download a free copy of it by going to Google and typing in “Firefox download”.

SEO for Firefox is a plug-in that lets you measure Page Rank of web sites while you are analyzing keywords in Google. You can download your free copy of SEO for Firefox at: http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

After installing both the Firefox browser, and the SEO for Firefox plug-in, simply toggle the SEO button so that SEO is running, and then surf on over to Google. Type in your keyword and let Google report back to you the search engine results. With the SEO plug-in turned on, you’ll notice that below each entry on Google’s organic search, an array of information is displayed for that web site. The first piece of data is the page position for each web site displayed. Right behind that number is what we are looking for: PR (Page Rank). The PR is followed by a question mark (?). By clicking on that question mark, the SEO plug-in reports back the web site’s Page Rank.

So, what is the actual metric that I use for determining how competitive my keyword is? I look for at least two (2) web sites on Google’s front page, with a Page Rank of “3” or below. Simple.

There you have it: I look for keywords that have both a minimum of 2500 searches per month AND at least two web sites on Google’s Page 1, with a Page Rank of “3” or below. When both of those metrics are satisfied, I get serious about diving into the niche.

Yes, there are many other metrics that you can use to help you decide which keywords to select, but the two I’ve described above are both simple to arrive at, and use tools which cost you nothing; both important considerations, especially if you are just starting out.

Technorati Tags: market research, niche marketing

by Scott Spooner

The State of Small Business Online Marketing Survey was released today by Campaigner (www.campaigner.com), a leading email marketing solutions provider. The report indicated that a plurality of small business owners are seeing the beginnings of an economic turnaround, and are positioning themselves “…for stronger growth in 2010 through the use of web-based marketing tools”.

We can take away two things from this report: 1) the global recession is, indeed, flattening out, with many sectors beginning to see local and regional turnarounds, and; 2) more and more businesses are moving towards an on-line component to their marketing mix.

If you are considering going online with a niche, or mass, marketing component for your business in 2010, now is the time to get in and establish your company’s foothold in the marketplace.

Read the original article at:  http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS129637+02-Nov-2009+BW20091102

(Reported by Reuters, Monday, November 2, 2009)

Technorati Tags: market research

This short video explores the SWOT Analysis as part of an overall Strategic Marketing Plan. Most people perform a SWOT analysis for entire companies, or across entire markets. This is the wrong approach, creating only generic results. Effective SWOT must be linked to a market segment.

From Oxford learning lab. For more information, go to: http://www.oxlearn.com

Duration : 0:4:1

Technorati Tags: market research, market segmentation, swot

Technorati Tags: market research, niche marketing

Technorati Tags: market research, niche marketing