This is a simple little concept, look at other companies in your field that have been around for a while and are successful as they have spent lots of time testing the marketing for you. Now you won’t get all the juicy details, but you’ll have a great place to start from and save yourself some time and money.

One thing, make sure you don’t just outright copy them, put your own spin on things, also check that they haven’t trademarked or patented anything, you don’t want to get into a legal battle with a company that has a good and long standing reputation, you’ll only harm your own.

Bonus Tip: When you talk to people at networking events and they say oh I already have that, ask them where they got it and why they were happy to buy it from them. This should give you a great idea of what your customers expect to get from the product or service you offer as well.

Here’s the link http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/statistics-for-changing-world-google.html and heres a video with a basic explanation.

Now there is more US data than UK data at the moment – this should get better over time, but if you do sell internationally (especially US) you will be able to look into for example specific growth areas of employment.

Granted some of the data will be a little out of date, but any marketer knows that it’s rare to get up to the month data like this (unless you spend a lot of money!). Most times it’s a best experience and knowledge estimate on trends using previous data to extrapolate how to exploit a particular area of a market.

This is why having someone who knows traditional marketing (generally referred to as offline marketing) as well as new marketing (generally referred to as online marketing) like we do is vital in being able to ensure there is a market place for a new website.

A slight side note and something that has been bugging me when I talk to new clients, every single one of them only want to pay for online makreting and they ignore the obvious offline marketing strategies. In today’s world too many people concentrate only on online marketing, what about the foot fall for retail, pubs, restaurants, events etc… you can’t possibly just do only online marketing, well not if you want to be successful, ok so mini edu-rant over.

Anyway this looks like it will become a great resource for the future and I look forward to keeping an eye on the updates Google make to the system.

Alan

Tesco found this out at Christmas by complete surprise with a new mobile phone they were selling.

Here’s the link

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/21/20100112/ttc-cheap-mobile-is-surprise-success-e1d36ba.html

Just before you go though, have a think about using traditional marketing techniques to see if you can identify a niche in your market and get there before your competitors.