Web Marketing

Any web marketing research shall benefit both web marketers and their customers. As I describe in the article What Can I do For You?, marketing is not about selling. The real marketing is about understanding what your customers need and try to provide superior services or products to meet your customers' needs. Therefore the function of marketing research is to understand what customers need and to gather information for web businesses to provide exactly what customers need.

For example, if a site owner is able to understand why people visit his/her site and why they come back again (from the survey results of SiteSurv, for example), they will be able to develop more effective strategies. Visitors are happy because the site provides what they want, and the navigation on the site is easier.

I believe these questions are currently the most important questions for every web marketer:

► a. Who will be my potential customers?

► b. Why do they shop online?

► c. What are their shopping habits on the street?

► d. How do they choose a company or a brand?

► e. How many segments are there in a certain market?

► f. Is there a niche market that's best for my Web business?

► g. What are the winning strategies?

Of course, to answer these questions, we need to conduct very sophisticated marketing research. For most small web businesses, they cannot afford it.

However, marketing research is not a methodology, IT IS A BUSINESS PHILOSOPHY. Even you know nothing about marketing research (as a method), you still can conduct marketing research. The very first and the most important thing a web marketer needs to know about his/her customers and the market is to ask the customers: "What can I do for you?"

Yes! In our recent Online Competitive Advantage study, we tried to understand what contributes most to the success of a web business. We have used a sophisticated research design to identify the "Key Drivers" of the success.

Suppose you are planning a web business. With a limited budget and time, you certainly need to focus your marketing efforts on the most important areas. Without such marketing research information, you are more likely to focus on what you are familiar with: if you are a tech guy, you may put most of your time and money to improve Internet development techniques on your web site. On the other hand, if you worked in the ad industry, you are more likely to focus on web site promotions.

But our research results show that the most important factor that contributes to the success of a web business is a solid marketing strategy. If you have such research information, you should put your money and time into designing your web marketing strategy. It helps you get on the right track at the very beginning.

Currently, we have several resources on our web site. The first is the email publication--Journal of Web Marketing Research. It provides useful marketing research information. More importantly, it discusses many important web marketing issues. For example, it was the first publication to question the validity of one to one marketing. It was the first publication to propose the concept of "Total branding management".

On the web site, we provide freeware--SiteSurv to help web marketers develop their site design strategies.

Our risk free and satisfaction guaranteed survey service CyberAnalyzer helps web marketers profile and target their customers on the Internet.

Research reports are a major part on our web sites. We are going to accumulate research reports at our web site and make WebCMO a definite destination for online research resources in the near future.

Limited marketing knowledge: while we have so many online research reports, how many different kinds of information do we get? Not much! So far, most online research are about "how many people are online" or "how many people bought online". While we have so many marketing issues to explore, why on the earth does almost all of the research explore such questions as "how many people are online", again and again, and again?

The answer is: most researchers don't have much marketing knowledge to explore the Internet issues. Have we ever heard from these online research firms discussing our marketing issues? If a marketing researcher has less marketing knowledge than his/her clients, how can he/she help the clients understand their markets?

A good marketing research consists of 80% marketing knowledge and 20% statistics.

First off, WebCMO is a web site dedicated to web marketing research. When we use the word "dedicated", we mean it. On WebCMO's web site, you see nothing but web marketing research. We have even rejected banner advertising on our web site many times because we want to keep it a clean place for marketing research. There is something more important than money in our world--marketing research.

Secondly, our attitudes of conducting marketing research. We are serious and treat marketing research as a science. However, many marketing research firms treat marketing research as a business. The very popular but unreliable online forecasts are good examples of such bad attitudes.

Thirdly, our web marketing knowledge makes us stand along among many marketing research firms. A good marketing researcher should be a good marketing strategist. Without a thorough understanding of marketing issues, one is unlikely to conduct good marketing research.

Lastly, it is our marketing research capability that makes us different. Have you seen marketing research firms use "advanced" statistical techniques in their marketing research? To us, these are the basic techniques for understanding marketing issues. We use them not because we want to show off but because we have to use them to understand complicated marketing situations.

It is hard to say "striking". However we did have some valuable and interesting findings in our research.

For example, about one year ago, while very few large online companies promoted their businesses through offline ad media and while the online advertising community doubted about the effectiveness of offline promotion, our research, Online Promotion Strategy Study, shows that offline promotion (for web businesses) is one of the most effective promotion methods.

Another example is that when comparing CPM pricing model with CPC pricing model, we assumed that advertisers preferred the CPC model because the CPC model give advertisers guaranteed advertising results. However, in the research Understand Advertisers' Preferences, we found that advertisers don't prefer the CPC model. A further study shows that this is because advertisers expect higher than average click through rate.

Good marketing research provides useful information. But useful information does not necessarily need to be striking. Of course, I do hope our research yields "striking" results. But I don't intentionally to pursue "striking" effects. To make the research result useful to web marketers is our fundamental goal in the research.