The Chasm between Web Traffic and the Business Plan

Peter Drucker once said, "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself."

While we can build a cleanly designed website, content management tools, social media plug-ins, and install analytics, it's tough to point out that the business concept might be weak on market research.  This usually comes to light when we do some quick secondary research on keyword traffic and notice a discrepancy between what a client's business plan might project and what the market is currently searching for to solve its problem.  Blame it on the entrepreneurial business press, but people still somwhat believe in the web as a magic bottle where you put up a site and Poof! outcomes impressive profits complete with customer evangelists.  (However, if you read the history of any big web company you see that it is not the overnight success it's perceived to be. Sergey and Larry tried to sell Google's IP to Yahoo! and would have closed up shop if it hadn't been for a visionary angel investor.)

Such imagined enthusiasm of how the market will adopt a new solution usually figures predominantly into how this new company will grow its customer base online.  But they don't have truly sound research to back this up... 

With this in mind, we'd like to point out the recent New York Times article titled, "Know Your Market Before You Leap".  It goes over highlights of marketing research and provides various links to resources - Check it out here.

In our next post we'll talk about some simple ways to do market research yourself.