Marketing Research Ideas

Verna Mason October 31, 2015 4 Comments

If you intend to become a successful affiliate marketer you must learn how to conduct time saving marketing research ideas before you dump a lot of time and cash into any particular campaign. For instance, what if I build a lavish hotel with all top of the line amenities, a 5-star restaurant and used the best architect money could buy. But, then I decided to build it on Mars! Obviously, I would never be able to reap a profit from it or even just break even because Mars has no population.

The point I am making is that if you put all your efforts and money into building a website or a specific campaign, but there is no market for it, you will be defeated in meeting your goal of success. I will share some of my marketing research ideas with you that will help you make more conversions.

 

First, determine which niches are in demand. It is not always necessary to choose niches that you have a burning desire for because sometimes it’s about making the coins. After deciding on a niche that is in demand, then you should find an affiliate network or an independent affiliate program that has a good assortment of products you can promote. This will make it possible for you to create a niche-specific website and will be easy to promote.

One of the most important practices that an affiliate marketer can learn is keyword research. Keyword research and marketing research ideas go hand in hand. Keywords or phrases that visitors search for in Google are probably one of the best and efficient methods of determining what people are searching for. If you use the right keywords you will be able to persuade the search engines that your website has content-rich information. Thus, you will be able to obtain the rankings you need to get traffic to your site.

Do You Know What Your Market Wants?

Your market research is never complete if you have not taken a hard look at the people and the problems that make up your market. You have to delve into the people side of the market because that can help you in a few ways.

• It may allow you to find additional keywords that may not have been obvious at the time you looked at the volume numbers of the keywords.
• If you can figure out what your market is thinking, then you can zero in on it better and chances are you will improve the results.

Every niche market has problems that people are searching for answers to. These problems are what compels them to Google the internet to find the information or products that they need. Out role as the affiliate marketer is to figure out what those problems are and to be able to offer a solution.

Determine What People Need

As an affiliate marketer, you can probably come up with a pretty good guess about what the problems of your market are. However, unless you are already an expert in that field, the only way you can really get into the minds of your audience is to actually check out what the market is talking about.

Most affiliate marketers look at the relevant keywords that have a high number of search volumes. For example, if you are creating a website about exercise bikes, you would most likely do a keyword search on “exercise bikes” to see what sort of exercise bike keywords most people are searching on.

A More Personal Approach

Using the keyword search is a great method of getting a general idea of your market. But, the real muscle of market research is being able to speak directly and purposely to the problems people have.

A good resource to get a better feel into your market is online forums. Participating in forum discussions will allow you to gain a more in depth picture of the important topics and concerns of the market. It can also generate ideas for related topics for content articles and potential marketing ideas that you have not even thought of.

If you want to locate forums, just do a Google search on “forum”. First, make sure there are a lot of people talking and also determine if the forum is well organized. If not, pass that one up and move on to the next one. After you have found an acceptable forum, check out the forum topics and you can get ideas for your website content.

Going Deeper

After you have some pretty good ideas from the forum, plow into the subject a little to see what people are discussing. This will enable you to find out what kinds of questions are being asked. If you know the questions, you can provide the answers.

The ideas that you come up with may not get good search volumes in the keyword tool. It will be up to you to decide if it will be worth tracking. The more targeted the niche search terms are the more likely they are to convert better than the general search terms. It is also easier to get higher ranking in the search engines.

Demographics

If you really want your market to listen to you, you need to see who they really are. Research can help you with some of the information, but you can get some of it through common sense. These are the areas that need to be considered:

• Age: How old are your visitors/audience? The type of speech for younger people may tend to be different from speech used for older audiences. The design of your website may be different; text size may be larger for older visitors.
• Gender: Does your site attract mostly women or men? Men are from Pluto and women are from Jupiter. They like dissimilar things and react in unlike ways. Don’t design your site to be masculine if you cater to both men and women.
• Location: The United States has the biggest online market and even though you may also target to other countries you should stick to using American language.
• Prior Knowledge: Are your visitors already aware of your subject? Don’t bore them with basic information and don’t go in over their heads. You will need to target content in view of that.
• Expectations: After visitors have arrived at your website, what do they think they will find? At first glance, there should not be a big difference between what they expect and what they think you are offering. If there is, they will click right out of your site!
• Note to Self: Don’t forget that Google reports the “bounce rate” to determine if people are finding the information on your pages useful. A high bounce rate could mean lower search engine rankings. Make sure the wording of your Title tags accurately portray the actual content of your page to help prevent a high bounce rate.
• Needs: Many marketers provide a lot of unnecessary information about product background, history of the product, including testimonials for the product. All the potential customers want to do is see the product. Or, there may be a lot of pictures of the product, but the visitor wants to see other people’s reviews and opinions of the product to help them make a purchase decision. Find that happy medium.
• Competition: Make sure your website measures up to the competition because people shop around. They don’t just go to one site.
• Tone: Don’t build a website for luxury, high-end merchandise and then use cheesy images. Or, create a website for children and use words than even you had to look up before you included them in our content.

Summary

Affiliate marketers need to understand the need to know who their market is and what their market wants. It is essential o being able to successfully promote and attract people to your website. Think about what your visitors what and what they need so you will be able to help them to make a purchase or provide them with information they are searching for.

Please feel free to contact me if you need help with anything. Just make a comment below or you can always get in touch with me through wealthyaffiliate.com (here is a link to my profile).