News Flash: The Internet Tells You What Your Customers Want

As discussed in “Forget the Hype: How to Use the Internet as Your Ultimate Marketing Tool,” the first step is to understand what the customer wants. 

In this article, we will show you the best way to get market research for your organization--authoritative, objective, quantitative and FREE--that will tell you where your customers are, how many are looking for each product and service, and exactly what attributes they are looking for.  Orienting your strategies and tactics to where your customers are now, and what they are looking for, will increase your sales and build your customer acquisition and brand equity, on or off the Internet. 

This is the Holy Grail of marketing:  to know, exactly what your customers are looking for now, and how many are looking for which products, services, qualities and attributes.  This resource works for any organization that markets any product or service on or off the Internet.  With this information, you decide which products and services to offer and how to market them. 

All smart eMarketing starts with the “Voice of the Internet Customer” (NOT with your products or current website), and up until now nothing has been harder to know. However, by way of Internet search engines, we now have ideal market data by way of the 350 million plus searches that are done each day.  Every time a search is done using a phrase (keywords), a customer is stating what they are looking for.  By reviewing which Keywords are being used, and how often, you now know what features your customers think are important.  Armed with this information, you could re-position your products or services as well as your website.

Having the ability to use any valid market research is great, but seeing the number of times a keyword is used is truly a great tool for businesses of all sizes because they:

• are objective and accurate (350 million inquiries per day can’t be wrong)
• give you a sense of the volume of interest in products, services and features
• describe the features of the products and services the prospect is looking for
• enable you to re-check the results whenever you want
• are 100% free

Here’s how to get the Voice of the Internet Customer: go to http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ays/ and enter your trial Keyword in the search field labeled "How many searches can your business get?" at the bottom of the page and click "SEARCH". Overture maintains this tool to enable web site marketers to select keywords for Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ‘purchase’ on participating search engines.