Gathering info about Your Market

Now that you have taken the leap into the world mar­ket­ing the next impor­tant step you need to take is to start col­lect­ing, ana­lyz­ing  and orga­niz­ing the infor­ma­tion you are gath­er­ing. All of the infor­ma­tion you are col­lect­ing about your mar­ket is your intell and you are the chief ana­lyst using your list, your online lis­ten­ing posts, your con­ver­sa­tions with cus­tomers  and their sales pat­terns. So let’s take a look at some of the ways you can turn this infor­ma­tion into a for­mat that will help you down the road.

There are four cat­e­gories you need to pay atten­tion to:

1. Web Metrics

The first part of web met­rics is Search Engine Opti­miza­tion (SEO) which is a way of opti­miz­ing your blog so that it can be eas­ily found and indexed by search engines, in return you are rewarded with higher page ranks on par­tic­u­lar search terms. The most non-geek types need to know is that ease in which you are found is rel­a­tive to the opti­miza­tion level of your blog.

The other part of web met­rics more impor­tant to you are the stats on who vis­its your blog, where they come from, what they read, how they move through and where they go after words. There are many ways to col­lect and ana­lyze this infor­ma­tion depend­ing on your rel­a­tive geek­i­ness. For the non geek the sim­plest is Google web ana­lyt­ics for the real nerds Woopra could become an obses­sion. Where Google give you raw stats Woopra shows you vis­i­tors in real time as they travel through your site.

By plac­ing a small bit of code into your blog or site you will be able to find out every­thing from usage pat­terns to geo­graphic loca­tions of vis­i­tors. For the artist trav­el­ing the art fair cir­cuit this intell can help you find geo­graphic pat­terns and if you are sell­ing on line the rel­a­tive inter­est level for one prod­uct over another. If you reg­u­larly update your blog with new work you can esti­mate rel­a­tive pop­u­lar­ity of a par­tic­u­lar prod­uct by the num­ber of vis­its to that product’s post.

Let’s take a quick look at the intell you can glean from some­thing like Google Analytics:

Gen­eral overview of traffic

This view gives you a sum­mary of infor­ma­tion col­lected over the period selected.

Geo­graphic & demo­graphic breakdown

This infor­ma­tion will tell the geo­graphic infor­ma­tion of vis­i­tors and when ana­lyzed deeper you’ll be able to see their entire jour­ney through your pages.

Total Pages Visited

Know­ing what type of con­tent your vis­i­tors read the most can help you both in your writ­ing and pro­duc­tion by know­ing what sub­jects or prod­ucts receive the high­est atten­tion. This level of analy­sis can also be taken deeper giv­ing you links to geog­ra­phy, etc.

All Traf­fic Sources

Know­ing where your vis­i­tors arrived from is very impor­tant espe­cially when look­ing for search engine arrivals. Pen­e­trat­ing deeper into this cat­e­gory you’ll be able to iden­tify the key words that brought your vis­i­tors to you. You’ll also be able to see what sites are pro­vid­ing you with vis­i­tors and the value of those vis­i­tors rel­a­tive to their time on your site.

2. Inven­tory info

One of the most impor­tant pieces of intell is your own inven­tory infor­ma­tion. If you col­lect and main­tain infor­ma­tion on not only your inven­tory lev­els but also how the prod­uct was sold, on-line,gallery, or art fair, you can eas­ily spot pat­terns. You will be able to see buy­ing pat­terns that will help you with pro­duc­tion strat­egy, mer­chan­dis­ing and inven­tory for appro­pri­ate for par­tic­u­lar venues.

The eas­i­est way to do this is to use a data­base if you work on a Mac and have OS10.5 or newer Bento is per­haps the best and eas­i­est to set up. Bento is a very scaled down and user friendly ver­sion of File Maker Pro which is also excel­lent but a lit­tle more chal­leng­ing to set up cus­tom data bases. Why use a data­base instead of a spread sheet like Excel or Apple Num­bers? The pri­mary rea­son is ease of use, ana­lyt­i­cal options and data entry, most data­bases today also have image fields mak­ing it pos­si­ble to insert inven­tory images.

Some of the infor­ma­tion that would be good to keep track of for inven­tory are:

• Prod­uct description
• Sales
• Pur­chaser
• Show or venue sale made
• Image of product
• Price
• Pur­chase date
• Notes spe­cific to the product
• Date it was created

3. Cus­tomer information

Main­tain­ing a cus­tomer data­base linked to your inven­tory can tell you a lot about your cus­tomers besides hav­ing all of their infor­ma­tion in one place. Here are just a few of the types of inell you might want to maintain:

• Per­sonal details name,address,phone
• Elec­tronic con­tact info– e-mail, social networks
• Item pur­chased
• Price
• Show
• Date
• Thank you card status
• E-mails sent
• Photo

If you are sell­ing high end work $100+ and you have the time your buy­ers will con­sider them­selves hon­ored to be pho­tographed with the work they pur­chased. You can then include that photo in their cus­tomer pro­file and even send them a copy along with a thank you card.

A ben­e­fit of keep­ing track of prod­ucts spe­cific to cer­tain buy­ers is that you can start to see trends and use those trends to sug­gest other sim­i­lar prod­ucts …like Ama­zon espe­cially if you are sell­ing online.

4. Trends

The pri­mary rea­son for col­lect­ing all of this infor­ma­tion is to help you spot and respond to trends. Being nim­ble enough to respond to trends which can change in the blink of an eye is crit­i­cal in today’s mar­ket. So here are some of the trends you might look for and how can ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion to spot them.

• Online trends

Using Google Ana­lyt­ics you can quickly find out what your read­ers are read­ing on your blog and try to deliver sim­i­lar infor­ma­tion in the future. You can also see the effec­tive­ness of your con­nec­tion strate­gies by keep­ing tabs on refer­ral sources like e-mail, or direct refer­rals both of which usu­ally mean vis­i­tors have your web address. Watch­ing google searches and the key­words asso­ci­ated with the search can tell you if and how peo­ple are find­ing you so you can adjust accordingly.

Watch­ing the pages or posts vis­i­tors hit can  not only tell you what they are inter­ested in read­ing but also if you are sell­ing on-line what prod­ucts are receiv­ing the most atten­tion. You can then use this infor­ma­tion in con­junc­tion with an on-line poll for exam­ple to help you deter­mine what parts of your prod­uct line pro­duce the high­est sales vs. Pro­duc­tion as in  80/20 rule.

• Buy­ing trends

Using both your inven­tory and cus­tomer data bases you can track buy­ing trends by price point, loca­tion, even demo­graphic if you have col­lected that info. So if you sell pri­mar­ily at art fairs you can use both data bases to deter­mine which prod­uct sells best, which price point expe­ri­ences the high­est sales to help you deter­mine what inven­tory to take to which show.

Another advan­tage of keep­ing both types of data­bases is that you can pay atten­tion to what your buy­ers pur­chase  and use that infor­ma­tion as a basis for con­tin­ued con­tact. You might ask them how they are using the prod­uct, if they are enjoy­ing it etc. Finally, hav­ing such detailed and linked infor­ma­tion will help you get them excited about recon­nect­ing with you when you return.

Col­lect­ing your intell will always change because con­di­tions, peo­ple etc. change the impor­tant thing to keep con­stant is using the intell to rein­force your core val­ues and mes­sage so that you iden­tify and serve the cus­tomers who will con­tinue to buy from you.

• Doll image cour­tesy of Brenna Busse