How To Successfully Compete In Your Market

A client asked me a question the other day about competing in a highly competitive market, what she called a “saturated market”. It reminded me of a story I heard while up in Alaska…

Two guys were sitting around a campfire out in the woods when a bear came crashing through the trees. One guy reached out and quickly began putting on his sneakers. The other guy looked at him and said “Are you crazy? You can’t outrun a bear!” The first man responded, “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.”

For a small business to compete in a niche market, you don’t have to be the best ever, you just have to be a little better than your competition. That means studying your competition, copy what they are doing right and adding a little more to top them.

There are some handy tools for monitoring your business competitors to see what they are doing. They are also great for initial market research. Read more.
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Video Intro To Google Trends

When doing market research or keyword research one of the tools I use is Google Trends. It shows data on search terms that includes the number of searches over time, whether in days, months or years.

Using this data can help you decide when to run online ad campaigns and is also useful for small businesses using direct marketing by choosing the appropriate time to run local ad campaigns.

Google Trends also shows data over time on web sites, whether your own or your competition.

The 6 minute video below provides an overview of Google Trends…

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Google Analytics Rolling Out New Features

Today Google announced new features it will be adding to Google Analytics in the near future. Google Analytics is its tool for use with Adwords accounts to learn which online marketing initiatives are cost effective and see how visitors actually interact with your site.

The first is two new goals available for tracking – time on site and pages per visit. With more and more businesses trying to track “engagement” in addition to plain numbers of visits they try to make their sites more inviting to visitors.

Google is also expanding mobile reporting. Previously, Google was only able to track mobile devices using Javascript but now you’ll be able to track traffic to your mobile website from all web-enabled devices, whether or not the device runs JavaScript. Read more.
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Free Tools To Find Your Target Market

Keyword analysis tools will tell you how many searches have been conducted for a specific keyword or keyphrase, but who is doing the searching?

What are their demographics, geographic location and time of the year they are searching? It makes a difference in your ad copy, ad placement and time of year you invest more heavily in advertising.

DEMOGRAPHICS

I’ve found two free tools that will help you find the demographics or your target market based on keywords.

The first is Microsoft’s Demographic Prediction site. It provides a quick and dirty look broken down by male/female and age.

They also have a site called Detecting Online Commercial Intention where they divide keywords into those looking for information and those looking to buy – a great aid for filtering keywords for your pages and ads. Look under Tools on the nav bar for other possibilities.

The second site for finding demographics is QuantCast.com You enter sites and they tell you the demographics. It’s doesn’t cover every niche, but if you enter some of the sites that show up in the top ten results of the search engines for your keywords, try entering a few of those to get an idea of your target market.

It breaks it down into sex, age, income, ethnicity, education and whether they have kids. They also show the number of visits to the site, whether the site accepts advertising, geographic location of the searchers, and what else the visitors also like. It’s really pretty comprehensive if the site is in their database. Read more.
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Science Fiction Becomes Reality

I came across Wolfram Alpha from a rumor that Microsoft’s search engine Bing would present some of the content that Wolfram Alpha generates. Then, Time magazine had Wolfram Alpha as one of its top 50 websites.

So what, exactly, is Wolfram Alpha? It’s not a search engine per se. It doesn’t provide links to answers. It GIVES you the answer that it calculates or finds in its database.

According to Wolfram Alpha

Our goal is to accept completely free-form input, and to serve as a knowledge engine that generates powerful results and presents them with maximum clarity.

From simple things like converting measurements to plotting out mathematical equations to the weather any place on any given day to geographic data on major cities to the fish production of France. Or even a comparison of the fish production of France to that of Poland.

It’s definitely worth watching the video on the site.

What else? A quick look at companies by their stock symbol, or comparisons of companies. Calculate mortgages. Find nutritional data of foods or add them up for a meal. Everything from mortality data to quantum physics.

I did find an article that says it falls short on baseball statistics, but this tool almost makes me giddy with delight!

Let me explain. The Internet has three basic uses – email, information and shopping – in that order. The information aspect has grown exponentially but finding that information can be a chore.

Read more.
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