Market Research

Last week saw the thrust and parry of dueling keyboards as [a mainstream media consortium] took umbrage with the blogosphere, and bloggers’ frequent quotations from the [mmc]’s posted stories. There were demands for the take-down of various blog pages, and attempts to collect fees-per-word of quotes, as well as rapier-like witty ripostes. You can read about this on the TechCrunch blog, Post 1, and and Post 2.

While this issue seems, on the surface, to be about copyright, fair use, and possibly expansion of new revenue streams, it also deals with attribution and citing of sources. This is not just for journalists. It is just as important to entrepreneurs.

When you write your business plan, especially if you are using the plan to secure funding, you must cite your sources. Your plan will have topics and statistics covering your target market, population demographics, spending habits, market trends, market growth, and the like. The banks or investors or VCs are savvy business people. They know how to double check your assumptions, and will have no qualms about calling your bluff…and quashing your funding if they don’t credit your stats.

If your business is going to provide day care services, you’d better be able to show an increase in young dual-income families in your area. Investors are unlikely to support the construction of high-end mansions in a community that has been losing all of its industry. If you forecast skyrocketing sales, you’d better be able to document how a similar product or service did the same, and why yours will follow suit, and not crash and burn in a saturated market niche.

In other words you can’t pull your projections out of your … that is, out of thin air! Do your research! Develop your forecasts using that information. Document your sources in your plan. Take a look at this blog post by Alan Gleeson, Managing Director of Palo Alto Software Ltd, in the UK. The post quotes several people, businesses and news sources, and includes links and footnotes. Your business plan should do the same, giving the proper attribution to your sources.

As a raconteur I can make it up as I go along. As a business owner you don’t have that luxury.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

Tags: attribution, business plan, citing sources, document forecasts, quotes, research
Posted on June 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

A few days ago the Wall Street Journal published an article about the results from a survey at a Microsoft Small Business event called Vision to Venture conference. The survey at this event found that 61% of women who own small businesses do no online marketing and 40% do not have a website. I read the results and naturally I was disappointed. Why is it that women continue to fall behind? But then as I thought about it, and investigated the source, I can say I don’t think these stats are representative of all women-owned businesses. Think about it:

1. Microsoft could have an agenda releasing this survey.
2. We don’t know where this survey was taken. Perhaps it was at a seminar or event all about how to take your business online. If that is the case you would expect most people attending to not yet have their business online.
3. We don’t know whether Microsoft enticed women to fill out the survey by offering any special prizes or rewards. What if the prize was a chance to win Web design time to get your business a website? If you already have a website you might not bother filling out the survey.
4. You get the picture - I can go on and on with different reasons to potentially doubt the survey.

So what’s my point? I think it is really important for everyone to understand that there are professional survey writers who know how to position a survey to get the results they want. Think about how politicians come out with survey results that always support them and their issues to a tee. I am going to say that I don’t believe that there is such a discrepancy between men and women in business when it comes to being online. I think that being online depends more on which generation you belong to than what gender you are.

-Sabrina Parsons, aka Mommy CEO
www.paloalto.com
www.emailcenterpro.com

Tags: research, Small Business, women
Posted on June 11th, 2008 | 2 Comments »

Ask any teenager how he keeps in touch with his friends and he’ll spin out his Facebook/MySpace/Twitter account for you. But most likely not his e-mail.

More and more young people are communicating via their MySpace pages instead of email. This kind of trend suggests that the landscape of how we market to consumers will be changing drastically in the next several years.

Does this mean all businesses should run out right now and invest in those social media networks, dropping their older, more traditional modes of marketing?

Well, no. Not exactly.

According to a recent survey, nearly three-quarters of adult e-mail users in North America still use e-mail as their preferred communication for business.

While the other channels are gaining ground, e-mail is still far and away the preferred choice of current consumers.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on June 2nd, 2008 | No Comments »

On the Freakonomics blog there’s an interesting conversation happening about “The Perils of Free Coffee”. Author Stephen Dubner tells two stories of free coffee offers that had the opposite effect than was probably intended.

There are, of course, a lot of different kinds of “free.” Giving away a free razor or a free computer printer in order to lock a customer into buying your razor blades or printer cartridges is one model; giving away free merchandise as a pure marketing play is another.

The comments are filled with more stories of people turning away from the “free” offer to go across the street to take advantage of a paid option - all to avoid standing in line.

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Posted on May 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

Gathering information is often one of the most challenging aspects of preparing a business plan or a marketing plan. A good plan supports assumptions with facts. Who says, besides you, the market for your product is going to grow 200% annually for the next five years?

A recent post by Michael Stelsner over on Copyblogger was the spark that led to this post. In his post he talks about using LinkedIn’s Answers feature to find credible sources for articles, blog posts, and white papers. It’s a good post and worth reading.

After reading the post, it occurred to me that services like LinkedIn’s Answers and Yahoo’s Answers could also be great resources gathering the information needed for a good business plan or marketing plan.

Your plan (and your business by association) will be better off if you can say that FirstName LastName, head of the IndustryName Association, said the market for your product is going to grow 200% annually for the next five years.

So give it give it a shot and let me know how it goes. On the surface, it sounds like a good idea.

– Cale Bruckner

[Photo credit: Flickr user Oldtasty]

Posted on February 27th, 2008 | No Comments »

When buying something online, how much do you care about how the buttons are laid out? More than you might think.

With content changes on
our websites, we typically use what’s called "A/B testing" to see how
those changes perform. Some site visitors ("group A") see one version
of a page; the rest ("group B") see a slightly different version. By
watching the analytics for the two groups, we can see which design
"wins" — that is, which presentation is clearer, more understandable,
more compelling, and so on.

One day last year, we were
experimenting with small improvements to the shopping cart on our Palo
Alto Software store. On the page that collects the buyer’s address
information, we tried moving the Continue button from the right side of
the screen to the left. We made the change and started the test — and
conversions from the address page immediately dropped 40%.

Forty
percent! Really? All we did was change the alignment on a button. The
product they were buying was the same. Nothing changed in the value
proposition of our software. The button was still visible and similarly
easy to find. No warning bells should have gone off. But for a huge
chunk of our audience, the left alignment of that button was a
dealbreaker.

This sort of consumer
behavior is surprisingly commonplace. E-commerce sites like
MarketingSherpa are replete with examples, like this case study where an office supply retailer changed the size and color of their buy buttons and lifted conversions by 44%.

Making sense of seemingly irrational behavior is the focus of the emerging field of behavioral economics. It’s been in the news quite a bit this week with coverage of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, a book by MIT professor Dan Ariely that identifies specific types of irrational decisions that people tend to make, and why. For an overview, see the book’s website, or check out Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent review of the book in the New Yorker.

Josh Cochrane
Director of Online Marketing
Palo Alto Software

Posted on February 24th, 2008 | No Comments »

Business is global. We have a global economy. Planning should be global as well. Business Plan Pro® Version 11.0 is designed to facilitate planning in the global environment.  When starting a business plan use the Plan Setup to choose a language pack, Spanish for example. The software then formats your topic outline and financial table row labels into Spanish.

El negocio es global. Tenemos una economía global. El planeamiento debe ser global también. Business Plan Pro® Version 11.0 se diseña para facilitar el planear en el ambiente global. Al comenzar un uso del plan de negocio la disposición del plan de elegir un paquete de la lengua. El software ajusta a formato sus etiquetas de la fila del contorno del asunto y del cuadro financiero en español.

Les affaires sont globales. Nous avons une économie globale. La planification devrait être globale aussi bien. Business Plan Pro® Version 11.0 pour l’union européenne est conçue pour faciliter projeter dans l’environnement global. En commençant une utilisation de plan d’affaires l’installation de plan de choisir un paquet de langue. Le logiciel compose vos étiquettes de rangée d’ensemble de matière et de tableau financier dans le Français.

Geschäft ist global. Wir haben eine globale Wirtschaft. Planung sollte global außerdem sein. Business Plan Pro® Version 11.0 für den europäischen Anschluß ist entworfen, um, im globalen Klima zu planen zu erleichtern. Wenn ein Unternehmensplangebrauch die Plan-Einstellung begonnen wird, einen Sprachensatz zu wählen. Die Software formatiert Ihre Aufkleber Reihe der Themaumreiß und der Finanztabelle in Deutschen.

Il commercio è globale. Abbiamo un’economia globale. La progettazione dovrebbe essere globale pure. Business Plan Pro® Version 11.0 per Unione Europea è destinata per facilitare progettare nell’ambiente globale. Nell’iniziare un uso di programma di affari la messa a punto di programma scegliere un pacchetto di lingua. Il software formatta le vostre etichette di fila del profilo di soggetto e del quadro finanziario in italiano.

Editor’s Caveat:  My paragraphs translated using Babel Fish. Mon employer traduit par paragraphes Babel Fish. Mein Punkte übersetztes Verwenden Babel Fish. Mio usando tradotto paragrafi Babel Fish. El mi usar traducido párrafos Babel Fish.  AltaVista-Babel Fish Translation

–Steve Lange
Senior Editor (and soi-disant humorist)
Palo Alto Software

Posted on February 14th, 2008 | No Comments »

I answer ‘Ask the Expert’ questions at www.bplans.com and occasionally I get a question that merits a special comment. This morning I had the following question:

Question:
What is the Environmental Analysis for this type of shoe business?

Comment:
This is probably a homework assignment. For the record, I’m not leaving anything out, the question is as shown here, with no additional information. "This type of shoe business" could be anything from manufacturing to retail to repair to whatever, and in any market, in any country, and with any mix of strategy and resources. So of course actually answering the question is impossible.

That, however, is not the point. That’s not why I’m choosing to post this on this blog. What’s interesting here is that this question illustrates a very common misunderstanding. It assumes that there is a "right" answer; that there exists "the environmental analysis" and the person asking the question wants to acquire that one right answer by asking an expert.

This is the same underlying world view that has created the strange proliferation of trade in sample business plans, as if there could be a right business plan for some generic kind of business, like a restaurant business plan or shoe manufacturer business plan. People ask for "the business plan" for a type of business as if it were a recipe. It isn’t.

If the question is homework, then the benefit the student is supposed to gain from it isn’t finding the supposed right answer, but rather going through the exercise of doing the thinking.

Answer:
The environmental analysis in the context of business planning normally refers to conditions and factors external to your company, outside of your company’s control, that might affect its sales, market, costs, and so forth. These are often grouped into kinds of factors, such as the common PEST, which stands for political, economic, social, and technological factors that might affect your company. They might be worldwide trends, or specific local market trends, or anything in between.

A good analysis looks at the specific individual context of your company, in your market, with your strategy and resources, and guesses how these factors might affect your company in the future.

– Tim

Posted on December 15th, 2007 | No Comments »

John, from Duct Tape Marketing gives some great advice on his blog on how to get in front of that journalist you are dying to have write a story on your company.
It’s very practical advice, and fairly easy to follow. Stop sending endless press releases and pitching story ideas… and instead follow John’s advice:

1. Build a list of journalists that you think might care about your story.
2. Read everything they write (use a Google News search by their name and subscribe to the email alert or RSS feed - you can follow a lot of journalists this way.)
3. Find their blog and subscribe to, comment on and write relevant trackbacks to it. (Most journalists have one now.)
4. Set up a routine of sending relevant content to them that is related to articles they write.
5. Don’t push for any stories (unless they are truly news) until you’ve done this for weeks

-Sabrina Parsons
Mommy CEO

Posted on October 8th, 2007 | No Comments »

I just posted on my personal blog, Mommy CEO, about marketing to women. There are some interesting questions that I bring up, and I wanted to cross post here at the Bplans.com blog.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in business planning is people who think that "everyone" is their target market. For example:

I am launching a shoe company. Everyone wears shoes, thus my target market is all 300 million people in the US.

OK, come on. Who are you kidding? Your shoes are probably built for a certain TYPE of person. Figure that out, and then tell me who your target market is.

Read my post about this at Mommy CEO.

Posted on September 28th, 2007 | No Comments »