Small Business Marketing - Know What Consumers Buy

Today is the first post of a three-part series for Small Business Marketing. Specifically, the series will cover:

Know What Consumers Buy
Know Your Customer's Online Behavior
Meet your Customer's Wants
So, off we go. 

Small Business Marketing - Know What Consumers Buy

Key Marketing Principle One – Know Your Prospect’s Motives

You’ve finally done it. You created a great product to sell. But, could it be that the product you think is ‘great’ is not something many others are interested in?

For small business marketing to be effective, you need to know if there is a customer base for your product or service. This is why it’s important to determine what people are buying. And, it’s important to know this prior to creating your product, if possible. If you already have a product or service available, this information will help you tweak it to be more relevant and attractive to potential customers.

How to Find out What Consumers Buy
You might be wondering how you learn about your prospect and his buying habits. Fortunately, the Web has made this easy to do. One way to find this information is to do keyword searches. Knowing what people are searching for gives insight into what they want and what they’re buying.

As an example of small business marketing and keywords, let’s use ‘alternative health options’ as a search word.

If you do a search for that particular keyword through Yahoo, you’ll realize the target market is broad. In fact, there are over 50,000 in the search results.

You can also do a Google Adwords search. Using ‘alternative health options,’ Google will provide you with an assortment of keywords related to your query and let you know their weight – meaning how many searches there are for each. For the keyword ‘natural health,’ there are 246,000 global searches.

The purpose of these keyword search tools is to provide you with information, such as:

•    What consumers buy - the types of products and/or services people are searching for, which shows what they want
•    The specific keyword or phrases people are searching under
•    Less competitive long-tail keywords that will narrow your target market
•    Product and name ideas

But, to see which keywords are actually relating to your sales, you should use Amazon, which by the way is an excellent keyword search tool. Simply type in the beginning of your query. We’ll stick with ‘alternative health options’ from above. So, type “alternati,” in the query box and Amazon will automatically list its most popular keywords for that beginning query.

This is valuable information for the marketer. These are the keywords that people are using to buy books and other products. And, since Amazon makes money when products are sold, they provide the most effective keywords.

After doing the research, the effective keyword you come up with will be the foundation of your product’s name and/or your website’s name. This is what the people you’re targeting are looking for, this is what they want. And, this is what you’ll provide.

Other Small Business Marketing Strategies to Determine What Consumers Buy

Join groups that deal with the subject matter you are thinking of creating a product around. Follow relevant keywords on Twitter and take note of what’s going on in the tweets. And, follow through on links provided in the tweets. The same goes for Facebook, Linkedin, GooglePlus, active blogs and newsletters. Read, read, read.

The information garnered through these strategies will help you create an effective name for your product, or if you already have an existing product, as mentioned above, it can help you tweak your marketing strategies in regard to its name, its appearance, and its promotional content. The same goes for your website.

The information you learn will also help you craft articles and content to establish yourself as an authority on the subject matter and draw traffic to your site.

Knowing what consumers buy is an important element in your small business marketing strategy.

Check out Parts 2 and 3 in this three part series:

Small Business Marketing – Meet Your Customers’ Wants (2)
Small Business Marketing – Know Your Customer’s Online Behavior (3)

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More on Marketing

Using Video for Promotion with Maggie Ball
Creating Content: 10 Online Repurposing Formats
How to Create an Ebook – 5 Simple Steps

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Until next time,

Karen Cioffi
Multi-award Winning Author, Freelance/Ghostwriter, Editor, Marketer

Find Karen’s eBooks on writing and marketing at:
http://karencioffifreelancewriter.com


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