How can you go wrong when you have a great idea? How can clever, witty or beautiful ads go unnoticed? Is there a way to predict the behavior of potential customers? How can you create marketing and branding materials that will bring in customers?
Ask. The first step in marketing a product or service or selling a brand identity is making sure it's the right product, service or brand. You have to find out if you have it right. The way to do that is to ask. Survey.
Every single aspect of your business can be improved through the use of surveys. It's true. Everything and anything can be surveyed.
Before investing in a new offering:
• Find out if anyone is interested.
• What makes them interested?
• How should it be packaged?
• What color should it be?
• How do you position it among its competition?
For existing products:
• How do customers feel they benefit from your product or service?
• What words do THEY USE to describe the product and its benefits?
• What do THEY think could be improved?
• How do they relate the product to other similar products?
Business owners and marketing managers need to know their audience, who they are, what they want, what they think about the company or product or service, what "position" the company owns in people's minds.
It's easy to miss the mark on a guess or partial knowledge. Instead, what if learning about and understanding customers' needs and expectations became the driving force behind development of products and services? What if the company brand, mission, image and advertising reflected the desires and opinions of its customers?
What looks like brilliance or even luck in achieving marketing goals, can simply be the fact that one company really understands its products and how they are actually perceived by customers and potential customers.
Savvy marketers have discovered that learning what's in the prospect's mind gives them answers, gives them the clever ideas that work. Answers come from the customer, from the marketplace, not from the marketing manager, or the boardroom or even the CEO.
There is nothing too trivial to survey. You can ask about products and services, about your staff, about packaging, about promotional materials, even about the emotional response to your company or product. Try it. You might be surprised by what you learn.
Never underestimate the willingness of people to give their opinion. Ask.
Benefits of using surveys:
• Know if what you are offering is wanted
• Find out if prospects understand the product or service
• Learn what benefits prospects want or expect
• Spotlight potential problems and new opportunities
• No guessing
• Understand the position your company holds in prospects' minds.
Use the information you get to:
• Improve your product or service
• Develop new products and services
• Build brand identity
• Create targeted promotional materials that get results
Tips for surveying:
• Tally responses when you are no longer getting different answers.
• Never act on a single opinion. Act only on the majority response.
• Always act on the majority response.
Marketing Research: Strategies for a Winning Marketing Plan
It's time for a new marketing plan and some of us would rather have our fingernails pulled out than sit down and work out a new strategy. So we put it off or wait for the new year to start this project, because the new year is a time to start over, to put the past year behind us and to make resolutions for the coming year. But, there is nothing that says we can only make resolutions at the beginning of the year.
One definition for resolution is, "A course of action determined or decided on." A marketing plan could be considered a course of action determined or decided on for the operation of a business. A marketing plan encompasses every aspect of a business. It is more than selling, more than advertising and, it can be done any time of the year. Furthermore, it can and should be reviewed several times a year.
Often, we start a new marketing plan by taking up where the old plan left off. We review that plan, maybe update a few items. We start out by asking "What went wrong? What went right?" This approach assumes all the data is in and all that is needed is to eliminate the things that did not work out and beef up the things that did work.
While that is a legitimate and very workable way to approach building marketing strategies, the focus is a bit narrow. It does not help shine a light on new opportunities, changes in the marketplace or industry, or new methodologies that might improve efficiency. Furthermore, the best marketing results come from tightly focused marketing that clearly communicates to a targeted audience.
In a workaday world that gives us little time for reflective consideration, we often tend to rush this process and assume that the company is doing what it should be doing, selling what it should be selling, marketing to the right audience, and is organized and staffed the way it should be. This year, let's take a moment and ask ourselves more questions about the market, our audience, our resources and our competition. Your marketing plan can take a whole new direction when you get the answers to questions such as: "Is this still the right thing to sell? Is this still viable? Is this what people want? Does it still fit with our corporate identity and mission? Who wants this product or service, and what are the benefits they believe they get? How do our company, our products and our services compare to similar companies, products and services in the marketplace today? Has our competition changed their product or business model?"
Once you get a good feel for the marketplace and any new opportunities or challenges coming from outside the business, it's time to take a look inside with questions like: "Have we added capabilities, skills or knowledge that suggest we serve new markets? Are there capabilities, skills, knowledge or equipment that we need to develop or acquire? Or should we be narrowing our focus to take advantage of specialized skills and services? Have we tried to become everything to everyone? Could we be number one in a niche market?"
If you honestly evaluate both the external and internal influences on your business or product, it becomes easy to develop a marketing mix for success. You will learn what you need to be telling clients and prospects and you will know who that target audience is. You will likely get information that indicates where your marketing and advertising budget should be allocated.
Whatever questions you ask, just be sure to ask them. One tip: If, like most of us, you don't have time for a long client and prospect survey, study what your competition is doing and evaluate what they do that is truly successful (not just everything they do), and look through your own customer records for trends, problems and successes.
One definition for resolution is, "A course of action determined or decided on." A marketing plan could be considered a course of action determined or decided on for the operation of a business. A marketing plan encompasses every aspect of a business. It is more than selling, more than advertising and, it can be done any time of the year. Furthermore, it can and should be reviewed several times a year.
Often, we start a new marketing plan by taking up where the old plan left off. We review that plan, maybe update a few items. We start out by asking "What went wrong? What went right?" This approach assumes all the data is in and all that is needed is to eliminate the things that did not work out and beef up the things that did work.
While that is a legitimate and very workable way to approach building marketing strategies, the focus is a bit narrow. It does not help shine a light on new opportunities, changes in the marketplace or industry, or new methodologies that might improve efficiency. Furthermore, the best marketing results come from tightly focused marketing that clearly communicates to a targeted audience.
In a workaday world that gives us little time for reflective consideration, we often tend to rush this process and assume that the company is doing what it should be doing, selling what it should be selling, marketing to the right audience, and is organized and staffed the way it should be. This year, let's take a moment and ask ourselves more questions about the market, our audience, our resources and our competition. Your marketing plan can take a whole new direction when you get the answers to questions such as: "Is this still the right thing to sell? Is this still viable? Is this what people want? Does it still fit with our corporate identity and mission? Who wants this product or service, and what are the benefits they believe they get? How do our company, our products and our services compare to similar companies, products and services in the marketplace today? Has our competition changed their product or business model?"
Once you get a good feel for the marketplace and any new opportunities or challenges coming from outside the business, it's time to take a look inside with questions like: "Have we added capabilities, skills or knowledge that suggest we serve new markets? Are there capabilities, skills, knowledge or equipment that we need to develop or acquire? Or should we be narrowing our focus to take advantage of specialized skills and services? Have we tried to become everything to everyone? Could we be number one in a niche market?"
If you honestly evaluate both the external and internal influences on your business or product, it becomes easy to develop a marketing mix for success. You will learn what you need to be telling clients and prospects and you will know who that target audience is. You will likely get information that indicates where your marketing and advertising budget should be allocated.
Whatever questions you ask, just be sure to ask them. One tip: If, like most of us, you don't have time for a long client and prospect survey, study what your competition is doing and evaluate what they do that is truly successful (not just everything they do), and look through your own customer records for trends, problems and successes.
10 Signs That Your SEO Is a Quack
It seems today that everyone is either a Web site designer or SEO wizard, promising unsuspecting prospects the riches of top-ranking sites, high traffic and motivated visitors. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff, the men from the boys, the scam artists from the professionals? Jill Whalen, SEO author and consultant extraordinaire, addressed this subject recently in a reply to one of her readers. She has graciously given me permission to include it in Solutions.
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10 Signs That Your SEO Is a Quack
By Jill Whalen
There are so many SEO/SEM firms cropping up that talk a good game but don't deliver results. This is in part because there's so much information that is freely available about search engine optimization. On the surface, SEO sounds easy -- and it really is -- once you've had a number of sites to experiment with. What's even easier than SEO, however, is discussing SEO as if you know what you're actually doing (when you don’t)!
Here are 10 signs to watch out for that may very well indicate that your potential SEO is a quack. Please note that one of these individually may not be bad, but if you notice more than 2 or 3 of these when speaking with any SEO company, you may just want to head for the hills!
1. Your SEO company talks about Meta tags and Google PageRank (PR) as if they are the magic bullet to high rankings.
For the most part, there's no reason to even bring up the keyword Meta tag nor toolbar PR in a discussion about what needs to be done to get better search engine exposure for your site. Both of them are issues that quack SEO companies will talk about because they actually believe they are the key to SEO success. They are not.
I've discussed in previous articles the Meta keyword tag’s lack of importance, so I won't go into that again here. In regards to PageRank, increasing the little green bar graph's number should never be the ultimate goal of a professional SEO campaign. A good campaign will automatically increase your real and true PageRank (as measured by Google) without your specifically setting out to increasing it on your own. Since PR doesn't bring you traffic and sales (nor rankings), increasing it should not ever be the main goal of your campaign. This fact is of course lost on SEO quacks.
2. Your SEO company's site (or those of their clients) has the same Title tags on every page.
Sounds crazy I know, but I've seen this more than once! I once got a client who had previously used a very major SEO company that most people have heard of. They had been with this firm for a whole year, and yet the Title tags on every page of their site were all the same (the name of the company). Since Title tags are probably the most important (and easiest) thing to change on a site, any SEO company that can't do this one basic thing for their own site or their clients’ is most definitely a quack!
3. Your SEO company talks only about optimizing for the "long tail."
Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with long-tail keyword phrases, as they can bring a lot of traffic when all is said and done. But you don't need an SEO company if those are the only phrases you're interested in -- you can do it yourself just by writing articles. Your SEO company should not be afraid to optimize for the actual keyword phrases that most people would use at the engines to find your site. Yeah, it's gonna take time and money to go after the most competitive keyphrases, but there's usually a happy medium. Most sites have plenty of phrases that are somewhere between long tail and highly competitive. Those are the ones you definitely want to target.
4. Your SEO company tells you it's ALL about links (or ALL about content).
SEO isn't ALL about anything. It's about lots of things all added together to make the perfect combination for your site. A linking campaign alone will never be as effective if you neglect your on-page content, and vice versa. Be sure that your SEO company looks at your site from all angles and makes sure all your bases are covered. Otherwise, they're probably a quack!
5. Your SEO company tells you that you need a linking campaign even though you already have tons of links and are a well-established popular site in your niche.
Not every site needs every SEO service out there. Just because your SEO company likes to sell link-building doesn't mean you actually need it for your site. Why should you pay for something you don't need? The same thing goes for sites that already have great, well-written, optimized content. If you've got that, perhaps you just need a linking campaign to help boost your traffic and sales. Don't allow an SEO quack to fix what isn't actually broken.
6. Your SEO company is almost surely 99% quackish if they tell you that they can rank your brand-new site in Google for keywords that will bring you traffic within a few months.
In fact, if they claim they can do it in less than 9 months, they’re either inexperienced or lying. Google has an aging delay that is most certainly related to the age of the site, as well as a certain trust factor. It is only the very rare and wonderful site that can get around this delay. But if your site is like most, you're going to have to look to the long term for your Google results, regardless of what the quacks might try to convince you of.
7. Your SEO company never mentions that they may very well need to redo your site architecture so that your important pages are prominently featured within your site navigation.
In this case it's very possible you're dealing with an inexperienced, quack SEO. This is usually something that is not a quick fix, so most quacks are reluctant to discuss it with you (if they even know it's important). But if your site architecture is not search-engine-ready, everything else you do will have much less impact.
8. Your SEO company can't provide you with any quality references.
This one pretty much goes without saying, but do be sure to get references, and do be sure to actually call them. Yeah, a reference may very well turn out to be their cousin, but you should be able to get some feel for the company you're choosing if you can at least talk to some references.
9. Your SEO company tells you that you have to have a DMOZ listing or your site will never be able to get high rankings.
Sure, a DMOZ listing is great, but it's a link just like any other. Submit and forget about it. If you don't get in, it's no big deal -- there are plenty of other links you can get instead.
10. Your SEO company's site mentions that they'll get you high rankings in AltaVista, Fast, Inktomi, Lycos, Excite, HotBot and the like.
If it does, you are 100% positively dealing with a quack! 'Nuff said!
------------------------------------------
Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.
Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) a local networking organization.
------------------------------------------
In closing, I'd like thank Jill for letting me share with Solutions readers what is some of the best SEO advice I've seen.
------------------------------------------
10 Signs That Your SEO Is a Quack
By Jill Whalen
There are so many SEO/SEM firms cropping up that talk a good game but don't deliver results. This is in part because there's so much information that is freely available about search engine optimization. On the surface, SEO sounds easy -- and it really is -- once you've had a number of sites to experiment with. What's even easier than SEO, however, is discussing SEO as if you know what you're actually doing (when you don’t)!
Here are 10 signs to watch out for that may very well indicate that your potential SEO is a quack. Please note that one of these individually may not be bad, but if you notice more than 2 or 3 of these when speaking with any SEO company, you may just want to head for the hills!
1. Your SEO company talks about Meta tags and Google PageRank (PR) as if they are the magic bullet to high rankings.
For the most part, there's no reason to even bring up the keyword Meta tag nor toolbar PR in a discussion about what needs to be done to get better search engine exposure for your site. Both of them are issues that quack SEO companies will talk about because they actually believe they are the key to SEO success. They are not.
I've discussed in previous articles the Meta keyword tag’s lack of importance, so I won't go into that again here. In regards to PageRank, increasing the little green bar graph's number should never be the ultimate goal of a professional SEO campaign. A good campaign will automatically increase your real and true PageRank (as measured by Google) without your specifically setting out to increasing it on your own. Since PR doesn't bring you traffic and sales (nor rankings), increasing it should not ever be the main goal of your campaign. This fact is of course lost on SEO quacks.
2. Your SEO company's site (or those of their clients) has the same Title tags on every page.
Sounds crazy I know, but I've seen this more than once! I once got a client who had previously used a very major SEO company that most people have heard of. They had been with this firm for a whole year, and yet the Title tags on every page of their site were all the same (the name of the company). Since Title tags are probably the most important (and easiest) thing to change on a site, any SEO company that can't do this one basic thing for their own site or their clients’ is most definitely a quack!
3. Your SEO company talks only about optimizing for the "long tail."
Now, don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with long-tail keyword phrases, as they can bring a lot of traffic when all is said and done. But you don't need an SEO company if those are the only phrases you're interested in -- you can do it yourself just by writing articles. Your SEO company should not be afraid to optimize for the actual keyword phrases that most people would use at the engines to find your site. Yeah, it's gonna take time and money to go after the most competitive keyphrases, but there's usually a happy medium. Most sites have plenty of phrases that are somewhere between long tail and highly competitive. Those are the ones you definitely want to target.
4. Your SEO company tells you it's ALL about links (or ALL about content).
SEO isn't ALL about anything. It's about lots of things all added together to make the perfect combination for your site. A linking campaign alone will never be as effective if you neglect your on-page content, and vice versa. Be sure that your SEO company looks at your site from all angles and makes sure all your bases are covered. Otherwise, they're probably a quack!
5. Your SEO company tells you that you need a linking campaign even though you already have tons of links and are a well-established popular site in your niche.
Not every site needs every SEO service out there. Just because your SEO company likes to sell link-building doesn't mean you actually need it for your site. Why should you pay for something you don't need? The same thing goes for sites that already have great, well-written, optimized content. If you've got that, perhaps you just need a linking campaign to help boost your traffic and sales. Don't allow an SEO quack to fix what isn't actually broken.
6. Your SEO company is almost surely 99% quackish if they tell you that they can rank your brand-new site in Google for keywords that will bring you traffic within a few months.
In fact, if they claim they can do it in less than 9 months, they’re either inexperienced or lying. Google has an aging delay that is most certainly related to the age of the site, as well as a certain trust factor. It is only the very rare and wonderful site that can get around this delay. But if your site is like most, you're going to have to look to the long term for your Google results, regardless of what the quacks might try to convince you of.
7. Your SEO company never mentions that they may very well need to redo your site architecture so that your important pages are prominently featured within your site navigation.
In this case it's very possible you're dealing with an inexperienced, quack SEO. This is usually something that is not a quick fix, so most quacks are reluctant to discuss it with you (if they even know it's important). But if your site architecture is not search-engine-ready, everything else you do will have much less impact.
8. Your SEO company can't provide you with any quality references.
This one pretty much goes without saying, but do be sure to get references, and do be sure to actually call them. Yeah, a reference may very well turn out to be their cousin, but you should be able to get some feel for the company you're choosing if you can at least talk to some references.
9. Your SEO company tells you that you have to have a DMOZ listing or your site will never be able to get high rankings.
Sure, a DMOZ listing is great, but it's a link just like any other. Submit and forget about it. If you don't get in, it's no big deal -- there are plenty of other links you can get instead.
10. Your SEO company's site mentions that they'll get you high rankings in AltaVista, Fast, Inktomi, Lycos, Excite, HotBot and the like.
If it does, you are 100% positively dealing with a quack! 'Nuff said!
------------------------------------------
Jill Whalen of High Rankings® is an internationally recognized search engine optimization consultant and host of the free weekly High Rankings® Advisor search engine marketing newsletter. Jill's handbook, The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines teaches business owners how and where to place relevant keyword phrases on their Web sites so that they make sense to users and gain high rankings in the major search engines.
Jill specializes in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, site analysis reports, SEM seminars and is the co-founder of Search Engine Marketing New England (SEMNE) a local networking organization.
------------------------------------------
In closing, I'd like thank Jill for letting me share with Solutions readers what is some of the best SEO advice I've seen.
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