Market Research Matrix II

How To Sort Your Marketing Research And Choose A Niche

Here is a 7 step filtering formula I have used in the past to determine my best niche candidates. Try this out to determine your best niche ideas. This is an important part of the “Research Matrix” method that shouldn’t be taken for granted as it will really help you make up your mind.

Once you have your top 5 ideas identified from Market Research Matrix I then you will use this second part to  size up each of your top 5 ideas and determine the one that seems to have the best opportunity for success. The one with the top score wins, but you can throw that out the window if you find one of the ideas close in score to the top is your favorite. Remember this is an exercise in knowing yourself with the added score to show you which ideas seem more likely to succeed…don’t choose a low scoring idea.

marketing research chart 2

This is an example of how your matrix will look once it is set up. This is just an example of how to set it up. You will list your top 5 ideas here and score them in 7 important categories. If something scores a 21 it has a very high marketing potential. If something scores low it probably won’t work for you. You can see one of the ideas from the previous chart ranks a 21 and one is a 19 and one 18.

The question then becomes what if you like the one that ranks 18 more than the one that ranks 21? You need to consider what each of these categories means and we have not discussed this so lets see what they mean and which matter.

Take a look at my next article to “Help Finding Ten Marketing Ideas” to find more ideas to run through the matrix. Here is the explanation of what each one of the matrix categories in the marketing research chart 2 above mean and how to use them.

Passion Check

Passion for a subject should be the most important factor for you in deciding between your top 5 marketplace ideas. So you will always want to pursue something you really enjoy. Your passion is very important in choosing your subject and will help drive you towards success more quickly.

Now if you need to make money and that is your main issue right now then it is fine to choose the niche with the most money and least competition. You can make money on something and not care about it, but why not promote an area you enjoy most? Your health and life will be better for it.

Profitability Potential

This is pretty self explanatory so just make sure your niche has profit before going into it. You can determine this in several ways which will be explained later. In general you can check an ideas profitability in many ways including these main four: advertisers, periodicals, products and survey research. If there are at least 2 magazines with advertising in them in your marketplace you can guarantee there is profit being made.

Check the ads out and see how the niche is being monetized to get ideas. You will also want to check out Click Bank, Commission Junction, Amazon and eBay to see how the marketplace is being monetized. Finally you will want to survey a market to get good ideas if you plan on creating a product to meet the wants of that niche. Profitability must exist in the area you plan on going into or else forget it, but it may not be easy to see if there is profitability without running a survey. Surveys are your final profit check tool and even if no one else is monetizing a market does not mean it can’t be done.

Want Market

The definition of a “want market” as we discussed previously is any niche that either desires the products around the subject or is looking for a solution to a problem around the subject or both. You mainly do not want to create an idea based on what people need, because a need and a want market are entirely two different things.

Once more you can check periodicals, forums, advertisements, products, blogs and survey a niche group to see what they want most. Blogs and forums are a great place to see what people in the niche are complaining about looking for and to also conduct a survey. You need to have a “want market” or else you are wasting your time.

Reachability

The niche you are targeting must be reachable and easily targeted if you intend to sell anything to them.  If it is not easy to target the prospects and traffic you will be selling to then you are likely to waste your time. Here you can again look at forums, blogs, products, advertisements and periodicals. You can also look at web traffic on Google for keywords related to the niche.

Check out the paid ads on Google search to see what is being promoted to these prospects as well as the top pages which are returned for the keywords you search. This is of course if there is even significant traffic for those keywords.

You can use several free tools to research the keywords related to your niche. You simply type in your major niche subject or variations thereof into Google’s keyword tool  (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) to find related keywords and traffic. A free keyword tool you may use is called “Spacky” and you can use this to find the traffic numbers for many keywords related to your main niche marketplace.

Go to Spacky here: http://www.spacky.com/. Also check out Lexical to mix and match various combinations of related keywords. This is a great tool for finding all types of keyword relations and is found at http://www.lexfn.com/.

Back End Monetization

This means you look for products in the niche directly related to your main front end product. These are usually higher priced items or items that compliment the main product directly. These can be sold on the back end if they are higher priced and you can also have an add on section on your purchase page when someone buys the main front end product. If it is a really high priced product you can have it as an add on product on the purchase page for the front end main product. If you like and also try to promote it through email after the sale is made as well.

There is no right way to do this only your prospects can answer that question for you through testing. It probably won’t hurt one bit to offer these things on the initial purchase at all because they are not invasive just suggestive. If something were invasive it would be to offer the high priced item as a One Time Offer on the sale of the front end product. An invasive offer would say something like: “also grab this $300 companion book now on obedience as I only have 20 copies left.”

You will want to investigate all possible back end products you can sell using some of the methods discussed already and those to be included in my upcoming articles. An example for the soccer training niche would be to sell a high priced training camp program on the back end of a video training product.

Tangent Monetization

This means there are products related to your niche but not directly to the niche itself and these products can be sold as an affiliate for you to make back end profits. You will want to make sure these products are things people who buy your main niche products would be looking for as a natural result of the niche products. They need to make sense to your main product concept.

A good example would be if you are selling a dog obedience book. What could you sell related to that which compliments the buy for some people? You could sell dog treats as these are used in rewarding an obedient dog who performs a command. You could sell dog collars or even dog care products even though they are not directly related to obedience they are related to dogs. You could sell household cleaners for dog messes and you will get some sales off of these types of products.

The idea is to monetize with related tangent products but not back end products directly in the dog training niche. Once more you can use Affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Click Bank to check for tangent products. These networks will give you far more ideas than we ever could.

Market Demand

This category is pretty straight forward. It measures if a marketplace is already buying the product idea or something really close to what you have in mind to sell. There are already many books being sold on the Internet about dog training and obedience so we will want to see how many sites sell these things in general. Use Google and Affiliate networks to discover this.

If you want to take a market’s pulse on demand you will want to also look at forums and blogs and see what people are talking about that they have purchased related to the niche. You will want to check the forums and blogs to see what they are buying. We are defining demand in the classical sense here meaning the supply of products related to the demand and how much they are selling.

Affiliate networks will show you what products are already selling related to the demand and show you what the top selling products are in those areas. You’re going to use the keyword information from Google to find out whether your prospects exist online and what the niche is searching for and then type in the product name from the affiliate network to find further keywords related to a product. This will reveal all new areas around your product and niche to study.

There are many places to research your ideas and these are some of them, but use your own intuition to find others as there are too many to list. You will plug these research tools into each of the seven filtering processes to discover the data you need to determine if that niche idea contains each of the seven factors for ranking. If it does you have a high profit niche after which to model ideas. The trick then becomes how to perfect your offer and conversion of sales.

A Market Research Matrix Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog