Market Research inside The Web Marketing Process (part 9)

This article is part 9 of a series. You'll find part one here. And part 8 here.

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Market research has a number of uses. Sometimes it can hint at new markets to sell an existing product to. Or spawn entirely new product ideas. It may even give clues about what motivates people to buy a particular product.

I find it's especially useful when combined with data from previous campaigns. For example...

• Let's say market research suggests that product X is likely to appeal to Facebook users
• And we have past results from Facebook advertising that show we normally generate one sale per £5 invested
• Our product delivers a net profit (excluding campaign costs) of £10 per sale
• This suggests we'll make a profit of £5 per sale if we invest in Facebook
• Put another way, our return on investment is likely to be 100%

In this case, market research has told us Facebook users are likely to want to buy our product. And data from past campaigns on Facebook suggest we're likely to double our money.

That's useful to know, isn't it? But what if we don't have past experience to fall back on? This is where trial campaigns come in useful. We can...

1. Use free methods of attracting Facebook users. See this web page for ideas on how to do that
2. Allocate a small test budget and run standard Facebook ads
3. Use a mix of free and paid advertising

We then run various trial campaigns until such time as we have enough data to be confident in the results we've achieved.

If we discover the resulting ROI isn't good enough to justify further investment, we can do one of two things...

1. Abandon Facebook as a marketing method
2. Examine our campaign ratios, and look for places to improve

I prefer the second approach. In my experience, if a marketing campaign is failing it's usually not the fault of the media.

If I'm not making money from a Facebook ad, it's probably not the fault of Facebook or it's clients. It's much more likely it will be one of the following...

• Maybe my offer doesn't appeal to Facebook users?
• Or my offer isn't getting in front of the right Facebook users?
• Is my landing page converting enough visitors into leads?
• Perhaps my sales approach isn't converting enough leads into clients?

Assuming we're tracking the campaign properly, the data will show where the problem lies. For example, let's say the data from our campaign delivered the following results...

• We paid £500 to advertise on Facebook
• We got 2,500 people to click through to our landing page
• 10 of those people became leads
• And 4 of these leads became clients

We got enough visitors to suggest the problem isn't with Facebook, or with the teaser ad we ran. Most of us would be happy paying 20 pence per click.

Likewise, most of us would be happy to convert 40% of leads into sales.

The problem is clearly with the conversion of visitors into leads. We're only getting one lead per 250 visitors.

We're going to need to look at the landing page, and isolate the problem.

It might not be clear what the problem is, and one way of finding out is to test different landing pages against each other.

The web makes it possible to rotate different landing pages. The first visitor will see version A, the 2nd will see version B, the 3rd will see version A, and so on.

Over time, one of the versions will deliver better results than the rest. Perhaps even significantly better.

Useful Market Research Resources On the Web

The web is full of useful research, data, resources and tools you can use to obtain valuable information about your market. Here are some useful sites to get your started...

• UK National Statistics
• Media Post: Click the research button
• International Internet statistics
• Internet market research and statistics
• Links to resources about online market research
• Information about Internet market research
• How to do your own market research
• Free market research resources
• DIY online survey tool

In part 10 you'll look at how to define your online target market inside the Web Marketing Process.

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