The Market Research Commandments III

Matching Streams of Traffic With Products and Your USP

The second important marketing research commandment we just went over was commercial value in keywords or what is sometimes called OCI “Online Commercial Intention”. There are a couple more things to consider in this regard but let’s also take a look at the third commandment which is a must. You must take an affiliate, existing or new product or service and match that product or service with appropriate traffic streams. In addition you need to consider how and why to offer specific products when doing your market research. It is a common sense approach to decision making and most marketers just don’t use this concept.

Ask yourself two questions:

• “What product or service can I offer to this traffic stream?”
• “How can I offer it with it’s own unique selling proposition?”

By asking these two questions what you are doing is essentially playing two roles at once as a marketer. You are following the age old economist theory of supply and demand or “giving the market what it wants in the right place at the right time”. Many people call this affiliate marketing which is fine but it is broader than that… what you are doing is satisfying a demand.

The second question addresses a more powerful and more difficult question and skill. “How can I offer something which is either a hybrid product, has added value, is completely a novel idea or any combination of these three?”

This is what some people call product development and some call this alchemy. It is a purely imaginative and creative skill. It is not measurable and can have immense value. It is the ability to coin new ideas completely. It comes to some people quite easily and others not so much. Sometimes such ideas flow rapidly and sometimes it is a process which takes weeks or even months.

Do not rack your head over it if you cannot make this alchemy part of marketing reveal a novel approach for you. The easy way to move forward within your market is to simply match traffic to products and services for starters and then use a hybrid approach or a value added proposition to that idea.

Let us backtrack to my latter point of finalizing commercial value when comparing keywords. In order to finalize commercial value let us look at our data through a different lense than our last example. Now let’s use this model for analyzing commercial value:

1) SEOV or SEO Value which is the sum of adding organic traffic or searches per day the top spot would expect to get from Google times the cost per click of that word in Adwords top positioning. We are assuming that the value is at least as high as the cost of the keyword otherwise competitors wouldn’t pay that price.

2) OCI or the pure Online Commercial Intention number as pulled from Bing. It is good to look at this number because it often reveals the percent of those keyword searchers who intend to buy. We cannot see that with CPC alone.

3) USP where traffic meets products and services. We must use our ideas to measure from a conceptual space if we can create a combination which is not already existing in the space of promotion to these keywords. This is the creative and ground breaking method by which whole new businesses are born.

It can take your research to a new level, but for completely new ideas you should test the water before moving forward with your idea. You can run a survey from: related forums, social sites, and competitor sites. The other option is to buy traffic and survey it about your idea and to glean new ideas.

4) Competition must be considered for the keywords you intend to target as a final measure of assurance. Do not proceed until you have looked at your competition. I will present the competition analysis in the last part of this series.

Here is my incentive for you to buy Market Samurai from Logiscape. Anyone who purchases Market Samurai through me may email or post a comment on the blog asking any market research question relating to the tool and how to best use it to improve your business. That’s right ask me anything at all and I will respond with my best information and even help you with your marketing idea within reason.

A Market Research Commandment Can Make Sense

Author: Scott Holden – TrafficEraBlog