"Search" Market Research

"Search" marketing was a $1.1 billion market in 2002, $1.5 billion for 2003, and doubling in the first 3 quarters of 2004. According to Jupiter Research search marketing is expected to soar to $11 billion by 2008 as consumers have embraced search as a way to find and acquire products and services to precisely match their needs. As such, search changes the way businesses acquire customer and in order to follow the trail of the customer, companies must adapt.

Internet usage growth currently 1/2 billion daily users is primarily limited to four search engines, namely Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and AOL.com. More importantly to marketing is the clear leader in search engine usage is Google at 56.4% of total search queries. In addition, Google provides secondary results for AOL (4th - 3.8%) thus providing a realized search market share of 60% of all search queries.

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Independent Surveys: Importance of Knowing Your Prospects & Customers

Strategic Planning Assumption: Through 2006, enterprises that fail to establish strong relationships with their constituents will erode their competitive position by 15-20 percent per year. Recent studies have shown that enterprises with loyal customers can generate profits up to 60 percent higher than those of the competitors. In addition, loyal customers make the enterprise twice as likely to exceed financial analysts' forecasts.

- Gartner, "CEM is Critical" article, June 18 2003

Today more and more companies around the world understand the importance of really knowing how their customers and prospects view their organizations. They also realize that customer viewpoints can change quickly. So how do you keep informed of your customers’ opinions? How do you know they’re continually satisfied? That they value your company? That they feel appreciated?

Gathering this data objectively, accurately and quickly can be difficult. Yet it’s critical in today’s competitive marketplace. Customer information usually comes from within a company. While this information may be useful as one data source, it’s seldom accurate and can vary across departments. Typically, customers and prospects are not honest when speaking with company personnel. Add to these human filters, interpretations and individual agendas and the end result can be misleading.

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Online Customer Satisfaction Measurement

by Contact 101

Customer satisfaction is ever-changing in both nuance and being able to detect if your company is in fact creating a positive impact. Advancements in technology and Internet have eroded geographical market barriers opening the door to global reach, new markets to penetrate, and while appealing, the rules that govern customer satisfaction are also being rewritten.

Customer satisfaction is paramount everywhere and the correct mix of tools that measure a gamut of new factors such as; cultural diversity and differentiated need a flood of potential customers may well sustain your company into the distant future.


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Benchmarking Customer Satisfaction

by Contact 101

Benchmarking is the process of comparison. Taking similarly related component and organizing in some meaningful fashion noting a variety of distinct differences which, is often a comprehensive list of variables.

When related to customer satisfaction the “similarly related” part is major grouping of customers e.g. all customers for a specific product or service. The distinct differences can include one or more of the following: geographical orientations such as; country of origin, State/Province, county, and city, corporate status (large, medium, small, entrepreneur (self-employed), home-base with leans to financial status or human resources, departments, functional areas, methods, productivity, customer retention, marketing, promotion, advertising or sales strategies, or tactics.

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Third Party Surveys, Beating the Survey Blues

In reading a newsletter that I receive from MarketingProf.com, I ran across this question that was posted bya Marketing Manager.

“I create questionnaires for my company to learn about their customers’ needs and worries. When customers complete the survey, they receive a discount. However, a disappointing three in 100 complete the survey.
What can I do to entice more people to complete surveys and improve those numbers?”

This is an issue we see with many of our clients who come to Contact 101 after they have tried to conduct in-house marketing research or customer satisfaction surveys.

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Quality Monitoring and Customer Experience Management

I recently came across an analysis report on Customer Experience Management by Gartner. Gartner gave some valid points on why you want to continuously monitor your customers and their experiences. We at Contact 101 call that Quality Monitoring using third party techniques to gather feedback on your customers and prospects. Others may call this market research, customer satisfaction, but they all lead to getting information on the customer experience and how to manage that customer experience.

Customer experience is delivered through many touch points (e.g., salespeople, call center agents, product brochures, web-sites, advertising). It is based on a customer perceived expectation of the value the product or service will deliver, so managing expectations of your company’s value proposition through reputation and publicity is an important part of delivering a good customer experience. To make sure you are hitting the mark you need to ensure consistency across channels and manage those channels via customer feedback.

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Marketing Research Tips & Advice

Market research is a necessary component to establish success for any business. Without it and simply relying simply on “gut instincts” is often met with dissatisfaction. It should be noted that outsourcing to professions will years of experience in answering mission critical questions is the most desirable as such services removes trial & error from the marketing equation.

Like any component of marketing such as advertising and promotion strategies or sales campaigns market research can be simple or very complex. A simple market research questionnaire can be forwarded with customer invoices to gather information, or having online surveys included in your website and include in a link to this in all outgoing email responses (as part of your signature block). No matter how you move forward the objective is to understand customer satisfaction so to help induce customer loyalty as well as to better attract new customers.

Marketing research tends to follow seven basic steps. Find more here for Marketing Research Tips & Advice.

What Type of Question Structure Do You Need

The first step in writing a good survey question is to identify exactly what kind of information you want respondents to provide. Virtually all questions that might be asked in a survey fit into one of 4 categories: open-ended, closed-ended with ordered choices, close ended with unordered choices and partially closed-ended. Each category tends to be better suited for obtaining certain types of information than others. Let’s look at each one closely.

Open-ended Questions

Open-ended questions do not provide choices from which to select an answer. Instead respondents must formulate an answer in their own words. This type of question takes the least amount of effort to write, but there are drawbacks that should be considered.

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