Weblog

What is marketing? It's a simple question, but has many different answers. When in need for the definition of a term the easiest way just to enter it in your favorite search engine and pick the definition that you like the best.

For this weblog article I choose the following definitions from BizJobs.com.

Marketing - perceived by lots of business people to mean simply promotion and advertising, the term marketing actually covers everything from company culture and positioning, through market research, new business/product development, advertising and promotion, PR (public/press relations), and arguably all of the sales functions as well. It's the process by which a company decides what it will sell, to whom, when and how, and then does it.

The reason that I chose this definition is because it highlights the fact that many people have an incomplete idea of what marketing is.

Marketing is much more than just advertising, it is the way you do business. The first step of marketing is doing market research. Whenever you have an idea for setting up a business the first thing someone will ask you is if you have done any market research. There are many ways of doing research, you can ask your friends and family whether they would like to buy your products, hire and pay a company to interview thousands of potential customers and write a scientific report about it or anything in between.

The results of the first market research are very important factors in deciding if you want to turn an idea into an business, and how to shape that business. The remarkable thing is that this is the only kind of market research many small businesses will ever do. It is understandable that most business owners want to spend their time doing business instead of doing boring things like accounting and research. Keeping an administration is required by law, but doing research is not. And if it could offer any guarantees about its results it wouldn't be good research.

But just like with accounting technology can make doing research a lot faster, cheaper and easier. Using a computer with an internet connection you can simply send out a questionnaire to all customers in your database let the customers enter their answers directly into the system and let the computer calculate things like the response rate, averages, trends and draw a some nice graphs for you.

You would think that since research is the basis of marketing, that most websites and weblogs about internet marketing would have research as one of their main topics for increasing sales and customer satisfaction.

The reality is that most information about internet marketing is about analyzing results from visitor counters. the goal is optimizing websites so that they appear higher in the search results and get more hits on a website. But unless your website completely depends on revenue from advertisements more hits don't mean you will get more income.

In a recent article SEO is About Communication at SEO.com it was pointed out that targeting a specific search engine is not the best way to go. Search engines try to get the most optimal results for their users, and continually change to improve their results. On the other side there are millions of people competing with each other to get listed highest in the results, which is like trying to shoot various fast moving targets at once, because Google is far from the only search engine, and the algorithms that are used and competition is continually changing and adapting.

Why not try improving your website for your visitors? Google and other search engines are trying to find the websites that best match the needs of their users and are getting better at it all the time. This does not mean you should not make your websites search engine friendly, but once you have done that you should not waste your time making micro-optimizations that require a lot of time to implement but give you very little in return.

The article at SEO.com points out the fact that just attracting more visitors has little use if your visitors don't take what you are offering them. To turn visitors into customers you have to improve your website for people, not for search engines. This is easier said than done. Measuring how many visitors you get is easy, understanding how they perceive your website and why they do it that way is the hard part. The last paragraph of the article contains the following advice:

Provide other feedback mechanisms to allow your customers to give you feedback about your message. Provide clear calls to action and give them multiple ways to contact you and provide feedback. Use your website analytics reports along with tools like ClickTale and CrazyEgg to find out your site visitors’ behavior. Spend the time to close the feedback loop so you can refine and improve your communication process.

Allowing customers to give feedback is a great idea, but instead of expanding on it further the article once again points toward tools that will merely allow you to observe your visitors, leaving you guessing for their true intentions. Is that the best communication you can have with your visitors?

What about just asking your visitors what they want? People can tell you exactly what they want to do on your website. Setting up a online survey takes a few minutes and will give you much more meaningful answers than tools that merely record some actions.

Being a recently launched website for surveys and quizzes, the biggest challenge for YouAks.com will be to show people that internet marketing is more than just optimizing your website for search engines, or analyzing the behavior of your visitors by spying on them. Instead you can engage them and get direct feedback, surveys are a cheap and easy tool that can be useful for any online business, no matter what size.