For your online business to get going, it needs certain areas of market research and statistics on its side. The only way to do this is to roll up the sleeves and get hands dirty signing up for Google Analytics, reading reports, and engaging in conversation with your audience. There are several ways that you can accomplish this last goal. Hold contests, respond to comments, send emails one on one, and conduct surveys with a test group of your visitors. Luckily, programs today make it possible to track all this information in ways that newspaper advertising never has been able to, and never could.
As for Google Analytics, this program alone is a godsend to your online marketing efforts. It will tell you a broad range of searches that have been run for certain keywords. It will open the doors as to where, geographically, these searches took place. It will let you know who is just visiting your page and who is taking the time to get deeper into the site and its content.
It essentially gives you everything that you need to know to reach out to your audience and create a successful marketing plan. But it is not the only way to acquire the details that you need.
It essentially gives you everything that you need to know to reach out to your audience and create a successful marketing plan. But it is not the only way to acquire the details that you need.
You should also consider using social media to your advantage. In many ways the hard part has already been done for you with sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Their "People you may know" and "hashtag" features, respectively, allow you to extract a list of parties interested in a specific topic right away and reach out to them. In fact, if you use Google Analytics for statistics and market research and social media for market research and outreach efforts, you may soon have more traffic than you know what to do with. But what you do with that data is what will ultimately make your enterprise successful.
That means you have to focus on content. You have to give users a reason to visit your site, and to keep coming back for more, and tell their friends about it in the process. Content is everything when it comes to non product driven websites. While at sites like Amazon, the product is the content, you may need something more. But you will never know what you need until you have a clear understanding of your target audience and a respect for what they want to see. And therein lies the keys to online success:
Find the audience. Give them what they want. If you can accomplish these two things, then your marketing will have done its job, and you can focus instead on how you are going to spend your money.
