How to Find What Works in Your Marketplace?

Overture provides an excellent tool to find what people are looking for on the internet. For all practical purposes, you can use that to apply to other types of marketing.

Go to http://inventory.overture.com. Type in some keywords that apply to your product or service. Overture will provide the number of times that search word was searched in the last month, and it will also provide a list of related words and how many times they were searched. This provides a really excellent tool to research what people are wanting, and how they are looking for them (at least what words they are relating to that search).

Using my business as an example: I provide training (sales, customer service, leadership and several other things).

So, which ones are in demand right now? I can do a search for ?training? on Overture.

The results are:

? Training --searched 165,196 times

? Online training, searched 149,418 times

? Management training, searched 133,499

? Sales training, searched 70,496

What can we learn from this?

? It looks like I should focus more online training instead of face-to-face, or local training.

? Management training is being searched for almost 2 times as much as sales training. So, shouldn't I focus more on management training over sales training? I'll certainly have a larger market.

This can be applied to almost any kind of marketing, direct mail, cold calling, email, website, etc. Not only can I find the best direction (management training) but I can also find the right words to use in a direct marketing piece before sending it.

Here's another one.

Use GoogleAdwords, a pay-per-click online marketing campaign to find what works. If you haven't experienced GoogleAdwords, just go to www.Google.com and search for something. When the listing shows up there will be 2-3 sponsored listings across the top of the page, and 5-6 down the right hand side. These are pay-per-click ads, those companies pay for the ads only when someone clicks on them. You are taken to that site. At that time the sponsoring company pays so much for each time someone clicks on it.

A really fantastic way of using this for a marketing study is that within 1-2 days, there will have been enough clicks to know which search words are working.

Another one of the fantastic benefits of GoogleAdwords is that they allow alternating ads in an Adword campaign. So for any campaign you can have several different ads running. Within just 1-3 days there will have been enough people searching and clicking through that you can see

? Which search words are searched for the most often

? Which one of the ads are producing the most click-thru's

It isn't unusual to see a 2 to 1 difference between the ads. So now you know how to say what in an ad and what kind of typical response rates you might have.

You can also take the best ad, tweak it again. Check back in a few days and know if you've improved it or not. I've seen pay-per-click ads crawl upward to 10-15% response rates in a matter of a week.

Now, it's time to start using those same words and structure in our next direct mail, or other direct marketing campaign. It's fast and very economical. Instead of taking weeks and costing a ton of money like a traditional test market would, we know in days what works for a lot less.

Want to know how many people are looking for your product in your small geographical area? Set up a GoogleAdword campaign and set the geographic limitation to your address with a known radius. Come back in a few days and see how many searches you got in that territory. Then go out with your local direct marketing with what you just learned.

Even if you aren't an e-commerce site you can learn a lot about what works in marketing this way.