Traditional advertising was based on where the ad was placed, such as in a newspaper or on TV. Traditional ads were absent of Ad-Fraud because it was easy to verify the ad’s placement. Then social media changed the game and placed ads based on an individual’s demographic and psychographic data. Ad placement was no longer transparent or verifiable. Since then, ad fraud has gotten worse each year.
Brand Awareness has two goals. The first is moving the knowledge of your product or service from the unknown or unconscious mind to the conscious mind. The second is making a positive association with the brand. If the prospect is aware of your product and thinks positively about it, it is infinitely more likely that that s/he will buy from the company. In this video we look at dozens of free and low cost ways to achieve brand awareness.
Many Libraries offer tools for entrepreneurs to use free of charge to help them with market research. One awesome tool is called DemographicsNow which is a powerful Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and even a Business-to-Business (B2B) tool. This video is a quick tutorial on how to use this tool and a few of the hundreds of useful reports you can run.
Learn how to make the most of a meager marketing budget by discovering how to identify customers ready to buy using the Viable Customer Model.
This video is a basic overview of how to do market analysts research on other businesses. The tool we are using is DataAxle (Formerly ReferenceUSA) Business Database offered by many public libraries. We access the tool using the Pikes Peak Library District portal, which is available to anyone with a valid PPLD library card.
NOTE: For Pikes Peak Library District (PPLD) users, the way to get to the database has changed, but the tool is the same. First, you need to select the “Research & Learn” tab. Then, choose “Search All Databases. Finally, select “D” to find Data Axle databases formally called Reference USA.
Welcome! I would like to introduce you to a tool that we have at the Pikes Peak Library District called ReferenceUSA.
To access this particular tool, it’s a very good business-to-business type of a tool. So if you’re at the Google line, you can type in Pikes Peak Library District or ppld.org, which will bring you up to this particular page right here. If you click on the Research tab here on the top of the screen, you will be presented with all the different research pages. We want to click on Business and Finance.
This is where we’re going to find ReferenceUSA, and we’re going to scroll down here until we find ReferenceUSA. Oh, and there’s ReferenceUSA. We’ll click on ReferenceUSA.
You’ll see that ReferenceUSA is actually a series of different databases. We’re going to be basically talking mostly today about the U.S. Business Database, but there’s also a New Businesses database, there’s also White Pages if you’re so inclined. And for another video, we’ll talk a little bit about this Consumer Lifestyle database as well. Here, you’re certainly free to check out any of these, but for right now, I’d like to talk to you a little bit about this Business Database, so let’s click on that.
This is the main screen where you would enter. This is your quick search. Typically, if you were going to be doing due diligence on a specific company, for example, you might enter the company’s name right here and then hit the View Results and kind of get there. But in this particular case, we’re going to be doing some research in terms of trying to locate businesses that are in a particular area of our interest.
So let’s say we’re assuming we’re going to go find some wine stores because we’re thinking about opening up a wine or new wine store. So we click on Custom Search right here, and as you can see, at this particular moment right now, we haven’t restricted any of our search. At this point, there are 15 million records in the database for different types of companies.
So first, we want to do is we want to select a business type. So we want to kind of drill down toward our retail wine business. If you know the company’s SIC code or NAICS code, you can actually click on this particular tab, and it’ll open up a dialog box, and you can enter in the NAICS code or SIC code and do that directly.
But it’s unlikely that most people are going to know that, so let’s go ahead and just kind of use this tool here—this Major Industry Group tool—which is sometimes a little bit easier to go ahead and use. You can see they have Agriculture and Forestry, Mining, Construction, and so on and so forth. But we’re dealing with the wine store. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do due diligence on seeing what other wine stores are out there to see if it makes sense for us to open up a wine store.
So that’s going to be Retail Trade. So we’ll click on the plus (+) box here, which will open up the dialog. You’ll see down here we have Building Materials and so on and so forth, Food Stores, and I don’t see anything that really kind of gets toward Retail Wine.
So let’s check the Miscellaneous tab. We’ll open up that. As we go down here, you’ll see, you know, Drug Stores, Liquor Stores, as well. I guess it would be considered a Liquor Store, so let’s open up Liquor, Cocktail Mixes. Oh, there we are—Wine & Retail. So if we click on that right now, now we have two buttons on the right-hand side here—Update Count and View Results.
I always tell people they probably want to hit Update Count first. So what we’ll do if we update count right here, you’ll see that there’s over 12,000 records in there right now that these are wine retail outlets throughout the entire United States. But since that’s not going to help us too much, we would probably want to go ahead and search for geography, which is another good one.
Here, you can see we can do an actual map search or by State or something, but I think Metro Area usually works pretty well for the kinds of things that I want to do. By clicking this, it will open up a dialog box. Down at the bottom here, you can see Metro Area. First, it asks me to select the state, which I’m going to do. I’ll select Colorado, since this demonstration is being done here in Colorado.
Now, we see various metro cities in Colorado, and here’s Colorado Springs. We’ll click on that. Now, if I update count, you’ll see that we have 17 retail establishments that specialize in wine.
So this is probably a good enough number; we can go ahead and take a look at it. If not, we would continue to refine this by various methods right here. Another one might be Business Size, either Number of Employees or Sales Volume or even some Financial Data.
But I think right now, 17 is a number that we can work with. So we’ll hit the green button here, which is View Results.
Here we have the 17 companies that match our search criteria. As you can see, we can drill down into any one of these. Let’s just pick this one right here.
Now, I will tell you that you can select these and then actually print them out, download them, and they will print to an Excel spreadsheet file. You can go ahead and sort that, import that into your contact management software.
But for right now, we’re just going to drill down and see which one of these might be our particular competitors. So let’s just pick this one right here—Drive-In Liquors—so we’ll click on that access live link.
So here’s the basic information that you would see, maybe in a telephone book. It has:
One of the other boxes here—you can see this is where they list the SIC codes and the NAICS codes. Here, you can see they are:
Sometimes it’s interesting to see what other kinds of businesses they’re in.
One of my favorite sections is Business Demographics. I think this is where you’re going to get 99% of the value out of this business-to-business database.
Here, you can see:
Another valuable piece of information is Mike Marcin. Mike Marcin would be the owner/manager of this establishment.
This is a pretty much an overview of the business-to-business tool available through ReferenceUSA at our Pikes Peak Library District.
Every product on the market has a predictable age cohort that is most likely to buy them. The study of associating the age of the consumer with a product category is known as Demand Curves. Businesses need to become aware of a product’s demand curve to properly target their marketing.
Consumer Product demand charts: https://stevebizblog.com/DOCS/Demand_Curves.pdf
Most businesses rely on a transactional revenue model. But many companies would benefit from a reoccurring revenue model. There are three basic types of reoccurring revenue models. 1, Curation (business chooses products). 2, Replenishment (Customer chooses automated reorder frequency). 3, Access (Membership allows for exclusive access).
A value ladder takes a prospect from free to your highest-priced product or service through a series of rungs on your value ladder. Each rung provides an increased level of value and monetary commitment from the customer as their trust in the business increases.
Related Post: https://bit.ly/37ONcGz
Big companies base their business on selling in high volumes. They can’t afford to take a stand on a controversial issue or risk alienating parts of their customer base. But a small business can build a loyal customer base by being polarizing on purpose,
How you approach marketing depends on if your customers are affluent or middle class. Here is what you need to know about each cohort.
Imagine that you have one million followers, and one day you are banned from the social media platform. It happens and can be devastating. However, there is a better solution.
People are conditioned to follow the advice of an authority figure. A business can use symbols/proxies to demonstrate authority, so consumers are more likely to listen to what they have to say.
Related link:
https://stevebizblog.com/the-seven-principles-of-persuasion-for-better-sales-conversions/
Time and materials or fixed price contracts require a lot of trust between the parties. Moreover, having a high bill rate makes many service providers reluctant to bill the customer. But there is a better way, and that involves menu or bundle pricing, which takes all the emotion out of asking to get paid.
Great marketers know how to exploit a prospect’s human adaptation in decision-making by introducing a reference point known as an Anchor to alter the prospect’s perception of value and fairness in what is known as the Anchoring Bias
Related link:
https://stevebizblog.com/how-to-leverage-a-customers-anchoring-bias-in-business/
