Marketing and Sales Strategies Begin with Deep Web Research

When you are looking at the “What Next?” question in your line item budget regarding marketing and sales support, avoid the headache. Start with the basics: research. The industry field for this is known as “competitive intelligence.” This term has spawned an entire industry of experts that know how to mine data and make sense out of it for targets and tactics. (www.scip.org) The strategic reasoning behind your marketing and sales objectives is crucial to meeting your bottom line sales goals. That’s why the competition must be observed, heard, and analyzed. This can be done live at tradeshows, for example, or in the content found on the web in a variety of formats from articles, to podcasts, to audio testimonials, to trade association listings, to social media such as people finder sites.

The definition of “competitive intelligence” is:

n. Abbr. CI A systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external information that can affect your company’s plans, decisions, and operations.

CI is the process of enhancing marketplace competitiveness through a greater, ethical understanding of a firm’s competitors and the competitive environment. (Source: Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals (scip.org))

Most small businesses would like to believe that anyone is a potential customer or client, but this is often not the case. In a business-to-business sale, the possible client list can get fairly defined and narrow, given the sales volume, locale, and level of management required for the sales transaction. This is actually something to celebrate. When you know where to aim your sales pitch, your company can make rapid progress and target market.

• It’s important to know:

– Who your clients are and the conditions affecting them;

– What your specialty is, based on the environment;

– What the market is doing globally, locally, regionally, nationally, and in international subsets;

– How other corporations, storefronts, web sites with similar missions are responding;

– Where industry trends may impact your decisions.

Finding the “right” research may involve any number of the following levels of digging before you have context for the content discovered online. For example, your firm may decide the best way to move forward is to ask your existing customers what they think through the use of a survey or one-to-one interviews. Another option may be to buy a trend or research report already made available on a national or international scale. Sometimes the best way to know what is going on is to simply read online the key journal articles in your field each month.

Having said all of this, there are web sites that provide you with ways to make sense of the data you find. Beyond typing in the Google search box, you can set up keywords in Google alerts to let you know when there are new articles on key topics of interest. Google analytics can assist you in finding out what activities on your own web site are having value for surfers and clients of interest. Many industry-focused web sites now offer mashups or maps, including Google Maps as a component, combined with other data that show you a view of a market. This is routinely used in real estate, for example, to show market pricing of houses in certain neighborhoods. Even media outlets use mashups, such as American City Business Journals (www.bizjournals.com) that show the first line of their most current newsfeeds from all of their key markets on a map.

For clients interested in specific subject areas, look to specific communities of interest like TechRepublic (www.techrepublic.com) for IT professionals and del.icio.us bookmarks on key topic groups that can be shared. Free news aggregation and link-sharing tools (i.e., the “my page” phenomenon) have become popular.

Innovations by communities online have created some interesting approaches to aggregated information for purchase. Some communities will not allow advertising inside their online borders, but they will let you extract data of interest for you or your clients. Sermo, a physician community, monitors sentiment regarding new procedures and drug protocols for a fee, which can be useful to pharmaceuticals, for example.

To build expert status for yourself in key industries or to capture the names of interesting parties in your field, you may wish to turn to people finder sites such as Wink, Spoke, Spock, and the like. Still, other sites are the professionals networking online for information such as LinkedIn, Plaxo, and XING. XING describes itself as a worldwide business platform for professionals, connecting know-how with know-who. With XING, you can find jobs, deals, and contacts with a click. Based on my own observations, Kentuckiana has embraced Plaxo and LinkedIn. XING has more of an international audience.

For companies and corporations with several offices selling various products and services, there are now tools that assist in aggregating a view of the web on their separate ad campaigns, issues, and other communications. These fall into a new category of “reputation management” software such as DNA13.com. If it is just social media, such as videos or discussion groups that you wish to monitor for surges in behavior and discussion sentiment, then tools like Collective Intellect, Inc. or Radian6 may be most useful.

Before you sign offline and go in search of information in person, don’t forget to go to your favorite trade association web sites, as well as to your trade magazines. Many times the web presence of these is extended from the print edition, offering groups of interest, online events, contests, data reports for signing up, and full trade member lists for contacts.

For those of you who do not pay to join, there are plenty of sites to explore for free contact information, including Jigsaw.com where you enter data and are able to take needed contact information from the system quid pro quo.

Before you begin your research, determine your questions. What do you really need to know? Hint: The first question is generally, “Who is our target audience for this or that product or service?” Consider that this question requires evaluation from year to year; as products and services evolve–so do economies of market and geographic goals. Identify your current top competition. And then, plan your unique selling proposition that leads to your branding campaign in your promotions and marketing activities. Go to www.aspectx.com and investigate the presentations posted on the site to assist you.