Market research helps measure progress

We know that market research is a vital part to any business, as it can help you understand what your customers need. It can also help you create benchmarks that to tell you if you are meeting your goals when it comes to your customers needs. Robert's Atomic Blog looks at why market research is important in terms of measuring your success.

Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – Unless you measure you will not be able to properly gauge how well your business is performing. Early research can identify flaws in your service or areas where a product needs to be improved, by conducting regular market research it will identify if improvements are being made and, if positive, will in turn help motivate a development team.

What Not to Do with Online Marketing

Guy Kawasaki of Entrepreneur.com offers 13 tactics to avoid when trying to make your online marketing a success. What other points can you offer to keep online marketing a valuable resource for your business?

1. Forcing Immediate Registration: Requiring a new user to register is a reasonable request—after you've sucked him in. The sites that require registration as the first step are putting a barrier in front of adoption.

2. The Long URL: Say a site generates a URL that's 70 characters long or more. When you copy, paste, and e-mail this URL, a line break is added. Then, people can't click on the link or it only links to the first part of the URL.

3. Windows That Don't Generate URLs: Have you ever wanted to point people to a page, but the page has no URL? Did the company decide it didn't want referrals, links, and additional traffic?

4. The Unsearchable Web site: Some sites don't offer a search option. If your site goes deeper than one level, it needs a search box.

For the rest of his theory, be sure to check out his original article here.

TMRE now on Twitter!

You can now follow The Market Research Event on Twitter!

http://www.twitter.com/TMRE

What would you do if you ruled the world?

The world is changing all around us and everyone has ideas about what they would do differently if they were in charge. If you were calling the shots, what would you do? Where would you start? What would be your goal? How would you make the world a better place? Speak up and spread your ideas by joining If Marketers Ruled the World today!

Who knows, maybe someone who really is in charge will be listening.

Join the community, share ideas in the forum, post photos or share videos.
If your idea is selected as the winner, you win a trip to THE Conference on Marketing on us!*

Everyone who posts an entry will be emailed an exclusive VIP discount code for THE Conference on Marketing taking place November 2-4, 2009 in Miami, FL.
For more details visit www.theconferenceonmarketing.com

* Offer includes complimentary pass to attend the event, airfare voucher for $300 and 2 nights at the Eden Roc Hotel.

TMRE 2009 Keynote: Joel Benenson

Joel Benenson will be a keynote speaker at this year's The Market Research Event. The Market Research Event will be taking place from October 18-21, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada. He will be presenting "Lessons from The White House: Stories From Obama’s Lead Pollster & Strategist."

Joel Benenson is a Founding Partner and the President of Benenson Strategy Group (BSG), and has personally provided strategic research and consulting to our nation’s political leaders, business leaders and major advocacy and charitable institutions.

Joel offers a unique combination of communication expertise and an aggressive analytical approach to research clients with messaging strategies that work in the most difficult situations. His extensive experience prior to becoming a pollster in 1995 includes working as political journalist for the NY Daily News, serving as Communications Director for Gov. Mario Cuomo’s 1994 campaign and as a Vice President at FCB, a New York ad agency.

Joel was the lead pollster and a senior strategist for President Barack Obama during the 2008 election. He has also been a pollster and strategist for U.S. Senators, Governors and Mayors from around the country. He also played an integral role as a pollster for the DCCC in 2006 when the Democrats won back the majority in the House of Representatives. The team Joel was on won 8 of 10 races, including helping to defeat 3 incumbents.

During his career, Mr. Benenson has worked directly on research projects for some of America’s foremost CEO’s including A.G. Lafley, Jack Welch, and Bob Pittman. He has also helped guide corporate clients through some of the most notable communication challenges in the past decade. He was the lead strategic researcher for Procter & Gamble’s launch of Olestra, the fat substitute; he was instrumental in helping AOL manage its capacity crisis in the late 90s; and he helped a NYC coalition block Mayor Bloomberg’s plans for an Olympic Stadium in Manhattan.

Joel is also the co-founder of iModerate Research Technologies, an innovative research company that connects respondents in online surveys in real time to a highly trained moderator for a one-on-one session to probe deeper into subjects within the quantitative survey.

Mr. Benenson is a graduate of Queens College of the City University of New York. He and his wife Lisa Benenson, who is the Editor in Chief of Hallmark Magazine, have two children and live in Montclair, N.J.

Read more about Joel Benenson here:
New York Times Article: Obama Seldom Asks His Pollster to Play the Role of an Oracle

Source: Benenson Strategy Group

Reminder: Free Webinar Tomorrow by MarketTools: Quality Research on a Budget

There are a lot of online survey tools available these days that allow you to do one-off research projects for next to nothing. While these inexpensive tools are relatively fast and easy to use, they don’t always yield quality results on which you can base important decisions. Why compromise? There are ways to do quality research without breaking the bank. Let us tell you how.

Join us to hear how your peers are doing high-quality research on very limited budgets. Our panel of experts will discuss their experiences and provide real-life examples of how they’ve been able to do it. During this one-hour webinar you’ll learn:

* Five simple guidelines for doing quality research
* How a panel can reduce your research cost and improve quality
* What companies are doing to deal with “professional” survey respondents
* When is it a good idea to call in the experts
* And much more…

Facilitator:
Mike Waite

Panelists:
Chris Schroll, Senior Manager Strategic Research & Analysis, Wolters Kluwer
Pat Merrill, Founder/General Partner, Merrill Research
and other research leaders from Fortune 500 firms

Register below, make sure to mention priority code MWS0025BLOG
https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/375147800

Breaking down your market

At HandMade News, they recently took a look at how to successfully identify who your customers are and what the target market is shaped like. It's obviously a very small market within your population, but how is a small business to find the market?

They start by identifying market segments:
Age: Are your customers young, middle-aged, or elderly?
Gender: Male or female?
Education: Have they graduated from high school? College?
Income: How much money do they have to spend? Are you targeting people with more or less disposable income?
Marital Status: Single, married, divorced, or widowed?
Ethnic and religious background
Family life cycle: Newly married, new baby, married for years, how old the children are

And then they go on to narrow it down further:
Lifestyle: trendy, conservative, pinching pennies, extravagant?
Social class: lower, middle, upper?
Opinion: open-minded or set in her ways?
Activities and interests: how does she spend her time? Reading? Watching TV? Riding her bike?
Attitudes and beliefs: is she interested in green products? Is she a community activist?

Figuring these things out can help you narrow down your target market and successfully find the right people to market your product to. If you've already done this, how have the demographics above changed with fewer customers spending less money these days?

Email marketing to balloon by $2 Billion

“By 2014 direct marketers will waste $144 million on emails that never reach their primary target,” said Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst David Daniels. “Successful Direct Marketing pros will alter their tactics to overcome inbox clutter and increase relevancy.”

This comes in a business wire release today as Forrester forecasts that, spending on email marketing in the US will balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate.

The report notes some of the growth areas shaping the future of email marketing:

* Retention email — email that recipients have blessed with their permission — will continue to replace paper communications and will make up the largest share of marketing messages. Retention emails will account for more than a one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014, representing increased competition for marketers.

* While the bulk of the market will continue to deploy email marketing on a self-service basis, the growing complexity associated with data integration and new tactics to increase relevancy will drive healthy growth in use of email service providers.

* Spending on ad-sponsored or ad-supported newsletters will double over the next five years as traditional print publishers face falling circulation and ad revenue.


For more information on Forrester's report, please click here.


Forrester Forecast: US Email Marketing Spending To Reach $2 Billion In 2014

TMRE Speaker Profile: Noah J. Goldstein

Noah J. Goldstein will be a keynote speaker at this year's The Market Research Event. The Market Research Event will be taking place from October 18-21, 2009, in Las Vegas, Nevada. He will be presenting "Yes! – Proven Ways for Marketer Researchers to Become More Persuasive."

Noah J. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Goldstein joined the UCLA faculty after serving on the faculty of The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

Professor Goldstein’s primary line of research involves the study of the factors that lead people to change not only their attitudes and opinions, but also their behaviors. His scholarly research and writing on the topics of persuasion, conformity, and compliance have been published in academic outlets such as Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Sloan Management Review, and in a recent book entitled Yes. He is also interested in several other research lines, such as examining the antecedents and consequences of feeling psychologically close to other individuals.

Dr. Goldstein has consulted for a number of private and public institutions, including Accenture, the United States Forest Service, and the United States Census Bureau.

Professor Goldstein has taught Managing & Leadership Organizations and Leadership Foundations I to MBA students at UCLA Anderson.

Source: UCLA Anderson

Archived Web Seminar: What are Words Worth? New Ways to Optimize Consumer Language

If you missed the BuzzBack's live webinar last Thursday, here's your chance to view it at your own leisure! Watch the archive webinar.

TMRE 2009 Keynote: Joan Lewis

Joan Lewis, Senior Vice President, Consumer & Market Knowledge, at The Procter & Gamble Company will share how P&G’s Consumer & Market Knowledge function steers
Company Strategy & Innovation. Hear about the role consumer insights play in P&G’s business cycle and how the research function drives competitive advantage and business growth. Don't miss her keynote session "How Consumer & Market Insights Steers Company
Strategy & Innovation" at The Market Research Event.