This is a great example of using a small dataset to extrapolate inaccurate results. I was reading this article, which reads like it was a press release,  and thought it had some interesting statistics and I really agree with what they have to say. Smart business owners are increasing their marketing efforts:

“With the critical holiday buying season on the horizon, it’s no surprise that small businesses are concerned about the uncertain state of the economy. Rather than accept the dire predictions of lower sales, most small businesses will bolster their holiday sales efforts with aggressive marketing plans”

Small businesses tend to use a mix of marketing methods, but the majority (60 percent) say they rely on email marketing most for the holiday season

60% will rely on email marketing?? What?? Every survey that I’ve seen showed that only 30-40% of small businesses even had websites. Which fits with my own personal experience. Even if we were to assume that every small business with a website used email marketing; which is highly unlikely,  we would still be short 60% of respondents.

When I checked to see who was surveyed I found out that Constant Contact had surveyed their customers. Now that made sense, 60% of the people who have a service to do email promotions are going to do promotions for the holidays. That’s like going to a soccer game and asking everyone to tell you their favorite sport.

What happens most of the time is that someone reads an article like this grabs the data and starts repeating it. But before you do that you must learn to see what the dataset for the survey was. It will keep you from repeating data that obviously is not true for the whole population.

Here’s the link to the rest of the article if you are interested.

U.S. Small Businesses Boost Marketing Efforts in Response to Economic Uncertainty Constant Contact Annual Small Business Holiday Survey Shows More Businesses Plan Heavier Promotional Push Earlier

U.S. Small Businesses Boost Marketing Efforts in Response to Economic Uncertainty – MarketWatch
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Tags: Googlekeyword suggestion tool, ed dale’s video, search marketing

According to reports from WSJ late Monday, Google Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG) is planning to unveil a new service that measures Internet usage. This new tool should help advertisers target the best places place their online ads with more accuracy than companies like ComScore Inc. (Nasdad: SCOR) and Nielsen Online who have to rely on panels or surveys, which can be inconsistent and incomplete.

According to the article Google’s new service will be offered to marketers for free like their Analytics tool, according to the ad executives who have been told about the service.
It will be very exciting to watch how well this tehcnology works.

What are your thoughts on Google making this tool available?
Doug

Tags: Google, marketing, google new ad service

I caught myself the other day giving my opinion on a market I really didn’t know. I was telling a gentleman some subjects that he needed to focus his energies on developing content for his market. But after I sent him the post I thought to myself…I really don’t know his market. So I resent him an e-mail explaining that I had made a mistake. A mistake that is made far too often by normally intelligent people. We feel that if we like an idea it must be the right idea.  That’s foolish and most if us do know better.  We always need to test. Repeat after me “I am NOT my market.”

I know some of you will say, “But I am the correct demographic.” You’re not, you’re too close to the decision. You can probably connect to the market and you may be correct more often than others, but you still need to test your ideas.

How do you test, it’s simple you ask questions.

But I don’t have a list. I understand, I’ve been there myself and am constantly in the same spot when I enter a new market. What do you do when you don’t have a list? Here are some ideas:

1. Find someone that has a list and ask them to ask their list. If you present it as part of a JV offer it will work some of the time. “I’m working on a new product that I think would be a good complement to your current offerring. Would you be interested in doing a JV? I would like to start the prelaucnh by asking some questions to make sure that we’re headed the right direction”
2. Run an AdWords campaign for your keywords and send them to a page asking them what their biggest question /challenge/concern is about your subject. George will walk you through setting up your first AdWords campaign at Online4Offline.
3. Go to forums and look for the most common questions or make a post asking for everyone’s biggest challenge/question/concern. You may start some competition and you may find JV partners doing it in a punblic forum can be a double edged sword.
4. Set up Google Alerts and see what others are saying about your subject.

I recommend doing a combination of these to get you closest to the correct answer.

We must ask our market what they want if we expect to be successful.