Before diving into creating, improving or marketing a web site, you would benefit from spending time to check the online market, online competition, online trends and new opportunities. A comprehensive market research is a very serious task that needs to usually be conducted by a professional. However, you would be surprised how much you can gain if you and/or your employees do it by yourselves.
Get on the net since your market there may be surprisingly different than your "typical" offline market (e.g. your biggest competitor offline may not even have an online presence yet). In addition, when starting to research the online market, make sure you are really getting into the mind of your customers. When searching for a product or service, most of your potential online customers start their search at a major search engine. In general, most people start out at Google, Yahoo and MSN, which, according to statistics, are the market leaders in the local and global search markets. If there are specific places that you know your audience is going to, check those out as well.
In addition, you should decide what your value proposition is. Your potential customers are either looking for a better featured service/product, for the same service/product but at a better price or for a product/service that is so focused and specific that they only know about you as a possible source. So you should look at how different competitors are positioning themselves and how are they communicating their value proposition to the market? Can you do it differently? Better? How about finding a creative way to cooperate with your competitor to build a win-win-win situation for yourself, your customer and your newly acquired partner?
When investigating the market, be sure to look at how other businesses, even those operating outside your market, are attempting to achieve the target action of their web site. Say, for example, that you want to sell a certain product over the Internet. Check out how others are doing it. What is special about their call for action? How are they using their copywriting and graphics in order to call their users to take the required action? What unique content are they providing? Why? What mistakes are they making and how can you do things better?
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As outcomes of your focused attention on the market research, you should also have a better understanding of who exactly are your online customers and who are not. This may be the most important outcome of your market research because if you're clear about this point (which may seem obvious but is not), you'll be clear on many other things that will follow such as pricing strategies, choosing marketing channels for your web site, articulating the tone of communication when talking to your customers (via web site text, auto replies, newsletters, etc.), which features or services not to present so you don't confuse your customers and more.
Market research and analysis is a very broad topic and this article does not cover its numerous aspects such as the process and structure of a market research, project timeframes, research models and more. In fact, market research can be done forever and in infinite ways. The point I want to stress out is that you can still learn a lot by yourself if you get online, really get into the mind of your customers, go where they are going and surf the way you think they are surfing, compare the options and find out how you can do things better - not only for yourself but mainly for your customer!
After doing the above, you can either start marketing your online business by yourself or preferably - you use the help of a professional. In any case, no one knows your business better than you so you need to have an understanding of what's going on and what your options are. Once you conduct some online market research by yourself, you will be in a better position to succeed online.
Read the next essential article in this series of articles:
(1) Define YOUR Internet Success.
(2) Target Action of a Website.
(3) Market Research and Analysis.
(4) Build a Website.
(5) Website Quality Control.
(6) Managing Your Online Advertisement Channels.
(7) Online Customer Service.
(8) Stay Updated & Innovate Online.