Marketing Situation Analysis and Resources

Before we start, if the text looks small hit "ctrl" and "+" together to increase the size.

If you've come once and decided to come back - I appreciate it. Marketing research and market analysis aren't always the most stimulating topics but they are key to success, and I believe even more so for smaller businesses where every dollar is very precious.

I've been studying more specifically on how to perform a strong market analysis, and have some basic outline information I'd like to share, that some of you may find valuable in your market analysis efforts. Also, at the very bottom are some links to basic, but good resources non the less for getting some data on your target market.

Situation Analysis

First off, lets get some purpose behind doing a situation analysis. I like the general one given in the text I've largely been reviewing (Author information below) called Marketing Research - A practical approach for the new millennium. Essentially, they argue that the point of a situation analysis is simply to determine whether or not a marketing strategy is proving effective or not. This analysis is broken into 3 main areas:

1. Market analysis
2. Market segmentation
3. Competition analysis

The Breakdown

Market Analysis

Market Analysis refers to studying a product market to possible gain information on how the market may change in the future. This includes studying such aspects as political trends, regulatory actions, economic trends, social trends and culture (this one is big), and changes in technology. On a side note - I like to watch for when these trends are combining and think of what opportunities or changes that might be creating (read social+technological).

Three great ways to work on a market analysis include:

1) Content Analysis through studying written works, stored data, various forms of media
2) Interviews - Strong, deep, interviews of experts in the industry with formal structure
3) Interviews - Formal questionnaires designed to pass to a variety of users to gain information on an environment.

Market Segmentation

The short and sweet of this is to figure out what makes people similar, and what makes them different, and then organize them into groups based upon this information. Market segmentation can include gathering information on brand preferences, product likes/dislikes, customer characteristics, as well as the normal social/economic studies.

I believe that this is an area where a business can gain an advantage through clever evaluation of the data gathered. Obviously gathering this information is helpful and obvious trends and groupings will probably appear, however the real competitive edge comes when a business is unique in interpreting and measuring the data. Learning to look across a set of data and spot unique trends or groupings can open up a deeper understanding of a market and how to reach them. The internet is great for this as there are thousands of attempts being made to combine different market segmentations into new products/venues for attracting consumers.

Competition Analysis

I'll try to make this breif. The goal is to understand your competition and predict their movements. Take your competition and rip them apart just as you would examine and rip apart your own company to spot flaws in your amour. Examine operations, strategies, marketing techniques, financial moves, branding, everything that you can think of. Then, go to the consumer and ask specific questions relating to a product market (brand preference, pricing, quality, shipping accuracy, etc). The goal is to identify a list of items that consumers can then rank by level of importance. This list can then be used to help evaluate how successful competiting companies are with hitting the consumers in the target market by measuring their success in each of the ranked areas. This competitive market analysis may show you areas to improve as well as help you predict what your comeptition may attempt to do next.

Quick resources for research data:
www.census.gov
market research firms (expensive, but good ones can give you a big leg up)
censtats.census.gov (provides some pattern information, by county, zip, etc.)
www.fedstats.gov (federal government stats)
www.businesslaw.gov (business law information
www.lexisnexis.com (gotta pay to play, but if you know how to do it you can gain some good info)

Marketing Concept, Marketing Culture, SEO and Responsibility

As some of you may or may not know, I recently graduated (within the last few years) from Azusa Pacific University with an MBA degree. Throughout my course work, I was hit by an “I don’t give a...” feeling. I guess that’s the problem with going straight from undergrad work to masters. Lately I’ve been finding myself diving back into old textbooks revisiting concepts and theories that I had bothered to learn, but not remember any true useful details.

One of these said areas is Marketing. SURPRISE! As I've heavily invested time and effort into learning everything I can about web marketing and specifically the SEO/SMM fields, it's becoming clear that there are great advantages to diving back into the old materials, as marketing principles don't really change despite the medium. The next few posts (I'm not sure how many) will relate to marketing, marketing research, and specifically some thoughts on combining the old school thoughts with the "new" marketing medium (www). Much of my reading will come from the Marketing Research A Practical Approach for the New Millennium book written by Joseph Hair Jr., Robert Bush, and David Ortinau.

Marketing: Concept and Culture

According to the text, the common marketing concept for all businesses consists of three major elements:

1) consumer oriented

2) goal directed

3) system driven

The authors continue to discuss the concept that businesses normally produce what consumers want, not what the business believes they need. Let's stop right there.

The big question (or one of them) I have is this: Do B2B businesses need to follow the marketing theory stated in this last section?

As a B2B business, Forefront Consulting aims to of course give a business what it wants. However, I believe that part of truly serving a business is giving them what they "need" even if they don't want it. Whether they choose to accept what is offered, is of course, up to them.

The SEO and Web Marketing Link
This is a bit of a leap, but for those that choose to stay with me, I think it will make sense. In general, there are more and more businesses that are aware of some of the possibilities that exist for building their brand online, but don't really understand what they are playing with. Think of a 16 year old who knows that a Porsche can go really fast and handle well, but has never driven a car. 16 year old + porsche (often could) = disaster.

As a Web marketing consultant, I believe that we ( me and others like me) have a duty to "take the keys" at times and get control of a situation. Marketing, no matter what the medium needs to be holistic in nature, and if web marketing is not properly supported by other parts of the business (goals, people, processes, resources) then great waste and damage can occur. As was stated in the text, the general marketing concept for firms is an all inclusive one.

I believe a major key to developing a strong web marketing and SEO/SMM campaign, is tight coordination with all aspects of the business. If this does not exist, you are playing with fire and the job of a web marketer to be successful hinges on things often outside of his control. This takes honest, an ability to analyze a business fully, dig deep into what the process are, flow is, buy in for your project, and identification of potential problems. To get started I often use a SWOT analysis for the business. This brings things into focus and begins to clear the picture for what role the web marketing campaign needs to fill. It's more than keywords, link building, competitive analysis, etc. It will affect all parts of the business.

So here is the next big question:

As business owner, if you spot signs of danger (lack of offline business and marketing support) would you worn the business (even if you may lose the client) or would you continue with a plan that may make short term profits for the both of you, but may ultimately end in damage for the business?

Tell me more about how you've seen interplay between a businesses offline operations and it's web marketing support.

Google Reader makes you smarter!

I have to admit, I'm not the first person to jump for joy over new things. Not that I'm against them, but I have often found it beneficial to look before leaping into new things that may end up costing more then they are worth.

As a result, I was late to the Google scene when it came to turly utilizing some of their applications, but have recently been diving in head first to take advantage of some of the better ones (in my humble opinion) for business, particularly small or technology based businesses.

Thus, we land at Google Reader. My friend and the brain behind the rising social networking and college review website communiversity.com, Michael Sprague, recently informed me that I was behind the times by not capitalizing on this reader's potential.

Within minutes I had quickly added many of my favorite blogs and sites related to web marketing, consulting, technology, SMM, SEO, etc. (as well as a few I hadn't heard of before) to my subscriptions and was off reading in no time. This concept is nothing new, but what I found most enjoyable was how simple it was to get exactly what I wanted and to know that I only had one place to go to get all the latest information from my choice sources.

The main point I'd like to make as a small business owner is the time savings and knowledge base that is at our fingertips. Instead of hunting, googling, asking, requesting, paying or whatever for valuable information related to my industry and field, I was instantly given the information in a format I could digest at my pace, but truly improved my ability to quickly digest information as well.

Here is a screen shot for those unfamiliar with the layout:

From Drop Box