Posted by randfish
The phrase "look before you leap" has never been more true! Before you start investing in tactics, it's important to do your market research. Many businesses are tempted to dive into the details before answering ...
Posted by randfish
The phrase "look before you leap" has never been more true! Before you start investing in tactics, it's important to do your market research. Many businesses are tempted to dive into the details before answering the bigger questions, like who their customers are, how those customers make purchase decisions, where their potential users are on the web, and how customers may choose between similar companies and offerings.
In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why building out a research-based roadmap before you start you building your tactics (like SEO, content, and social campaigns) will help boost your chance of success. Leave your thoughts in the comments below!
Conducting Market Research Before Investing in Tactical Execution - Whiteboard Friday
For your viewing pleasure, here's a screenshot of the whiteboard used in today's video:
Video Transcription
"Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to talk a little bit about doing your market research before you start jumping in and investing in tactics. Shout out to @Andrew_Isidoro on Twitter for suggesting this topic. I really appreciate it Andrew.
The reason this is so important and why I was so passionate and why I was excited when Andrew suggested it, is because I've seen us here at Moz and many, many other companies back when we use to do consulting, even with the folks that I try and help today, lots of people I talk to all over the industry, making this mistake of wanting to dive right into the details and start sending their tweets and building their content, tweaking their website, set up their conversion tests, optimizing their pages for search engines, all that stuff, before they have answers to the big questions. Who's our customer target? Where on the web are they? How do they make their purchase decisions? What are their influencers? What are the things that influence them to make a purchase or not, and how do they choose between different companies and different offerings?
If we answer these questions, we can build something really beautiful, a research based roadmap. We know things like the personas of who we're targeting. What types of customers are we trying to reach? For example, when we launch SEOmoz Pro years ago, we thought we were just trying to target primarily, at least, in-house marketers, people who worked in-house at companies, not consultants and agencies. So we hadn't built things like white labeling and custom reports and the ability to add your logo and all that kind of stuff, branding. Those personas were critical to getting the product right. About 40%, in fact, of our customers are agencies and consultants.
Channels, what are the channels that we're going to reach people at? Is it social networks? Is it things like YouTube, where there's a lot of video going on and obviously a lot of search activity? Is it Google and Bing, where the searches are taking place? Is it content? Are they only at events? Is there a very, very small set of these folks and we need to reach them initially through events or direct outreach? Do we need to build a sales pipeline and then have introductions being made? Are we going to use LinkedIn? Those channels are critical to knowing what marketing things we're going to do.
The tactics to pursue on a per channel basis. So it could be the case that the same tactic I'm using again and again on a certain channel is going to work very well. You could see, for example, that content marketing for Moz, at least, works pretty well across all of our social channels. But it's not exactly what we do in person. We try and have a very educational bent to a lot of our content, and that might change up a little bit depending on which forum we're in and what kind of folks we're trying to reach or who we're talking to at the time. So t