Market intelligence
Market Intelligence is essential to building a successful website.
If you have expended time and effort into the analysis and gathering of information on your market in offline areas, then you already have a huge advantage. This data is as relevant to your website as it is to any other business department.
For example, you can use the customer related analysis to discover what your customers need and can provide this through your site. You can engineer areas of the site to help your customers, give them a secure login and share private information, or its a perfect source for you to offer more efficient and cost effective resources.
If however, you haven’t spent any time on developing market intelligence, don’t worry your website can also be your main tool for gathering it.
Where you advertise and position your website becomes important, and will help you to discover where your product or service fits. This in turn may help to discover new markets.
Ask yourself who is your target market? Why? Are they accessible online? Are you utilising your website to be market specific?
Here are a few tips that are really important in generating market intelligence to help grow and sustain your website:
- Know your market and how a website can be used to get the results that you want in your market.
- Your site can become a hub of activity and interaction between you and your clients. Use it. Find out what your customers want and give it to them. Don’t try and charge for small downloads or advice, give them away for free, it only increases the likelihood that more people will come back and eventually purchase something meaningful from you.
- Retain details - Gather contact details for further market research, learn from feedback and ask customers what they want.
- Look at your competitors (see competitor intelligence), what have they got, what features do they use. How can you incorporate the better parts of their website into yours, and how can you improve or avoid the worst parts of their site.
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