A Good Marketer Is Always Researching

The Internet is awash with products and services that offer customers more choices than ever before. This has made the job of differentiating your products and services all the more difficult, which gives credence to the importance of understanding your marketplace, your competition, and how your company can effectively compete.

Knowing the all-importance of developing long-term customer relationships is placing heavy demands on marketers everywhere. This is why the term “market research” should not scare you off, but it is an activity in which you need to regularly engage. By using market research, you can comb through the myriad of factors confronting your company—or possibly confounding it—and pinpoint a clear and focused strategy to drive your entire marketing program.

Researching your market can provide your business with specific snapshots of key insights on how to win more attention and close more deals. That should be reason enough, but here are a few more benefits:

• good market research can let you know what your customers really think about you;
• it can tell you if your pricing is too high, too low, or just right; and
• it can let you know if you need to change any of your products or add new ones.

In our many years of consulting, we have consistently observed that many troubled companies got that way because they didn't want to allocate market research dollars to their marketing spend, preferring to instead invest heavily in awareness building and lead capture. Don't misunderstand, those are good and useful dimensions as well.

Think about it, though. If you don't research your customers, prospects, competition and overall marketplace, isn't marketing a lot like shooting at a flying duck with your eyes closed!

Today, every company is its own publisher and responsible for its content. That fact has shifted the ability to make strategic decisions for the company, lessing the role of marketing firms and industry publishers. The good news is you're in control. The bad news can be—if you're not experienced in strategic marketing and/or publishing—that you are in control!

This paradigm shift gives organizations an enormous opportunity to take charge of their brands using blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and the many other online platforms to engage your customers and prospective customers. However, it has also provided the opportunity to overspend in some areas and underspend in others, in terms of budgeted time and dollars.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while leveraging your foundational market and customer insights:

1. Use a clear call-to-action proposition.
2. Provide client success stories.
3. Provide two layers of information: overview and detail, not necessarily together or on the same page.
4. Employ high-quality images throughout all of your inbound and outbound marketing.

If you focus on the right strategy that your customers will respond to best, you’ll develop a winning marketing formula. Yes, your total marketing budget is important, but how your customers and prospects engage with your products or services across channels is the key issue.

Research shows that for everyone in the developed and linked-up world, the products they select must both meet their needs and be easy to use. Therefore, determining the right customer engagement strategy will pay dividends for years to come.

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Tom Wants To Hear Your Branding Issues:
Tom Marin, Managing Partner of MarketCues, wants to hear from you! Follow MarketCues on Twitter for branding and social media tips - as well as the latest trends. Tom also welcomes emails, new LinkedIn connections, calls to 407.330.7708 or visit www.marketcues.com. How can he help solve your branding issues?

Note: If you are a printing company or product/services company serving the print-media market, and would like to be considered for a feature in this blog, please contact Tom Marin for an interview.