‘Market Research (src wiki), includes social and opinion research, [and] is the systematic gathering and interpretation of information about individuals or organizations using statistical and analytical methods and techniques of the applied social sciences to gain insight or support decision making.’

Your business exist because people do. Businesses are not fixed and static ‘entities’, just like people themselves are not.  People and brands are part of this complex world we live in. And with the growth of Internet medias, social networks, and online marketing, mentalities are changing and they’re changing fast.

What do customers want?
What are their expectations?
What information do they need?
What encourages them to buy?
What prevents them?…

Ultimately there’s only one way to find out the answers to these crucial questions: speak to the customers directly. Market research in a very important component of a business strategy. It is essential to achieve an increased understanding of the subject matter. With markets throughout the world becoming increasingly more competitive, market research is on the agenda of many organisations, whether they be large or small.

What about you? Find Out More About Market Research

If your business name is spoken, written, or displayed anywhere, your web address should be the next piece of

information that is seen or heard. And whenever possible, prominently. Some would argue sharing your website address is even more important today than your slogan or positioning statement. What do you think? Take a look at the list below.

Did I leave one out? Comment at the end and let me know.

1. Business cards
2. Letterhead
3. Envelopes
4. Thank you cards
5. Business forms
6. Fax cover sheets
7. Radio ads
8. Print ads
9. Billboards
10. Yellow Pages
11. Press releases
12. As part of classified ads you place
13. During any type of free media exposure
14. Community sponsorships
15. Local business directories
16. Word of mouth – To prospects and customers
17. Word of mouth - Friends and family
18. Word of mouth - Your staff to their contacts
19. Brochures
20. Sales literature
21. Displays at your Chamber of Commerce
22. Displays at local group and association locations
23. Displays at other businesses
24. Cork boards at your grocery store, coffee shop, library, gym, etc…
25. On promotional items (hats, t-shirts, magnets, pens, etc…)
26. Your store window
27. After-hours voice mail
28. Line holding message
29. Event and conference signage
30. Permanent outdoor signage
31. Lawn signs
32. On company vehicles
33. On out-of-office company equipment
34. On company uniforms
35. Car door magnet
36. Window decals or bumper stickers
37. In local guest books
38. On donation wall hangers at the convenience store
39. Your license plate…darn, not enough room

Did I forget one? Leave a comment and add to the promoting your website list.

Yet even the short space you get in paid ad needs some real attention if you’re going to get any clicks and — more importantly — the right kind of clicks.

So here are seven golden rules for great paid search copy.

1. Be Current

You should update your copy all the time — your paid search campaigns can’t be stagnant if they are going to be as effective as possible.

So, be current — use current affairs, seasons, and festivals to make your adverts stand out. Maybe it’s sweets at Halloween, boiler servicing at the start of the cold snap, winter sun holiday offers in December — whatever. The message is more effective if it’s current.

2. Tug Heart Strings

You may only have space for a few words, but don’t be afraid to pull at the heart strings if your product suits it.

So instead of “Gifts for women this Valentine’s” — try using “Make her smile this Valentine’s.” This will help you stand out from your competitors.

3. Make Your Search Target Audience Clear

The last thing you want is clicks from irrelevant people — they’ll use up your budget and likely won’t spend when they arrive on your pages.

If you’re experiencing this problem, then explain what your audience is within the ad (e.g., “Cheap van hire for businesses”).

This can also allow you to control your market, if you want to increase a certain group of customers (e.g., “Cheaper car insurance for second cars”).

4. Test, Test, Test

You never finish setting up your paid search campaign — it’s always a work in progress.

To get the most out of your campaign, you need to test different copy, campaigns, keywords, and even times of day.

Even if your campaign is working well, don’t assume it couldn’t work better. Test new copy and keywords — and constantly strive for a better result. Allow yourself to become complacent and your business will suffer.

5. Be Local

Never forget that PPC is a live auction and you’re competing for clicks. One great way to attract attention is to show you’re local to the customer.

If you’re specific to a location, then don’t be afraid to advertise the fact to searchers who’ve included a city or region. Even if your business isn’t focused on a specific location, geo-targeted ads such as “fancy dress in London” help to draw the eye of searchers and increase click-through rates (CTRs).

Obviously, you can still target national searchers. It just helps you stand out even more to one particular group.

6. Make Your Headline Arresting

OK, so you don’t have much space and your headlines need to show relevance and promise a solution to the search query — that’s a lot of pressure for such a small space.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t write a punchy headline — a hook to grab people’s attention. Come up with a few ideas and test them until you find the most successful.

7. Offer Something Extra Special

Do you have a special offer this week? Are you offering a discount your competitors can’t match? Then let the searcher know.

This will help you stand out from the other paid ads and will garner you clicks from people who’d normally simply move straight to the organic search results.

Having an events calendar works well, both for content creation ideas — but also for keeping ads current and giving a reason to base a new special offer around (e.g., the World Cup, Queen’s birthday, St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, etc.).

Want another example? How about “iPhone 4 deals from £25″ — you show the value of clicking on your search advert straight away – Search More Posts

In a struggling economy, it seems obvious that the best course of action for any business that wants to expand, or indeed survive, is to look at markets outside of their local website area. Not only does export open up your product to a larger number of consumers, but it also protects you from the whim of a single currency’s fluctuations.

So if we take it for granted that exporting is a sensible business strategy, and that the Internet is by far the most cost-effective method of international website marketing and trade, then all that remains is to decide how exactly to target foreign language markets online through your website.

It may seem like a sensible option prima facie to create website targeted by language, rather than individual localized sites for each country; after all, English is the official or primary language of more than 50 countries, Spanish is the official language in 15 countries, and 29 countries are Francophone — surely it makes a lot more sense to simply create one website for each language and be done with it?

Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.

Optimizing Your Website Search Engine Results

For starters, it will be a considerable boost to your website search engine rankings if your localized sites have a local top-level domain (TLD) — such as .de or .fr — and are hosted on service providers in the target country. So if a French web surfer searches for [librairie Paris] and you’re running a online bookshop with a .fr TLD hosted in France, then you’ll be much more likely to turn up in the French search results.

This isn’t always possible or financially feasible, though, so Google also provides a website geotargeting tool that allows you to set the location of your website in line with the relevance of its content. If your French online bookshop is hosted in China, you can now set your geolocation in Google Webmaster Tools as France, and your website will be more likely to appear in specifically French web searches (but not searches conducted in French-speaking Africa or Canada). This also works if you have country or language specific subdomains off your main site, as you can geotarget individual subdomains to specific countries.

Website Differences in Dialects

Perhaps more important than the domain names, though, is the fact that not all languages are the same across countries. For instance, think of the list of differences between U.K. and U.S. English — everything from whether to use an “s” or a “z,” or if there’s a “u” in color, to whether pants are worn on the outside, and whether “tabling a motion” means you’re proposing it for, or removing it from, consideration.

It’s not only English that can change dramatically between countries.

The Spanish spoken in Spain is vastly different from Latin American Spanish, and then there are the differences in dialects of Latin American Spanish between, say, Mexico, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. Not to mention that in Spain you can choose between four recognized regional languages (Aranese, Basque, Catalan/Valencian, and Galician) depending on which region of the country you’re focusing on.

And that’s not even bringing in the regional differences between Chinese dialects, or the French spoken in France and that spoken in Quebec, or in Francophone African nations.

Cultural Website Differences

Besides the differences between regional dialects of international languages, there are also the cultural differences between countries to consider, in both your manner of writing marketing copy and also your way of approaching the sales process (do your customers prefer buying items on a individual basis, or do they like value bundle packs?).

For instance, making reference to chat show philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy in your website for French Canada will likely draw a blank with your target audience. That’s still better than referencing “poutine” on your French website, though — people will likely think you’ve misspelled a curse word, which is embarrassing on more than one level.

Getting the right mix of appropriate tone and cultural reference is essential for creating a bond of trust with customers. You can’t achieve that level of specificity with a website if you’re trying to appeal to the inhabitants of more than 10 countries at once.

Therefore, your best option is to create a localized website for every country you wish to sell in. The next step after that is to optimize you website for the most popular search engine in each country, but that’s a topic for discussion next month.