Marketing research. How to check the business idea for a week, spending a penny?

Those who are faced with the order of market analysis and marketing research from well-known companies know that a more or less useful report can be obtained in 2-3 months of work with a cost of 100,000 rubles or more.

But in most cases, an entrepreneur needs an answer to just one question: “Will it popret or not?”. And only then, “if it does, how much?” In the form of numbers and fast analytics, feedback from the first potential customers.

You can, of course, use the services of agencies and business analysts simpler or create a questionnaire yourself and go out ... But as we all know, everybody lies, and the data can be greatly distorted. That is, the sense of such a study would be zero.
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I suggest a different approach. It does not matter whether it is an online store, a boutique in a mall or a new production - even before launch, you can study the demand, the size of the audience and calculate the payback period of the project. You must admit that it is unpleasant to spend half a year launching and advertising a business for half a year and several hundred thousand rubles (or even millions) in order to understand that he “did not shoot”.

My version is a “multi-path”, but the implementation of only the first stage, which will be discussed, is already well answering the above question.

What will we use? Of course, the Internet. Now everything is changing rapidly - the mood of customers, technology, trends in design, so it is also important for us to test our business idea as quickly as possible. Preferably yesterday, right?

The research path is as follows:

1. Make 1-5 one-page. Yes, yes, I know, everyone is already sick of them, but we have to save time;
2. Pouring traffic on them from contextual advertising Ya.Direkt, but a little differently than in the classic advertising landings;
3. Track statistics and feedback.

So, step by step.

Single pages

Even if you have a whole catalog of products or services, it makes sense to choose 1-5 of the most potentially popular and sold ones. And it is for them to make landing pages.

Why a maximum of five? Because there are only five links to add to one ad Ya.Direct (including “quick links”) and we have only a week to go.

A good option is to use one of the popular designers to collect everything in a more or less decent form and not spend money on design and layout. In this case, the domain + service cost will cost 1.5-2 thousand rubles.

Remark on the appearance of landing. It all depends on the expectations of your audience, so often “cool” design will be a waste of time and money. It is unlikely that you can now surprise users with a beautiful picture.

Even this works (sometimes modern design just scares):



The page is best done in a minimalist form:

• Only the most important: what problem and how we solve, how much it costs, the better competitors;
• Call to action (call, letter, registration, pre-order, that is, everything that can be counted and linked to the advertising channel);
• Either we give something free for contacts, as in the example above (we send the link to this free by mail or SMS).

Pour traffic

An important point: we need a lot of traffic (a lot of it applies to our niche) and it should be as cheap as possible. For example, the minimum cost at which I was able to bring the target visitor to the site for the selection of cars with mileage - 4 rubles.

How to get a lot of cheap targeted traffic?

Here we need to remember that we will advertise in Ya.Direct, which has a large affiliate network. The difference between advertising impressions in YAN and search results is that in the affiliate program the ads will be shown based on the history of your search. That is specifically for you. According to your interests. Therefore, in one ad unit you can see completely different advertisements depending on what you were looking for earlier.

Just in case, YANA are Yandex partner sites that display ad units. You probably met them on your favorite sites, in the mail and many more where. They look something like this:


Let me remind you once again: advertising is shown by interests. And here is one very interesting point: the same person at different times is a consumer of completely different things. In the morning he can look for a taxi to go to work, at lunch - where an inexpensive business lunch is, and in the evening - from which to build a future home. This is called target states.

What does this mean? The fact that if we advertise a construction company, we may well get into our target audience by displaying advertisements for phrases not related to houses directly or not at all related to them. Such advertising in YAN completely miss.

I think the principle is clear?

Another nice thing: advertising business lunch and taxis are much cheaper than homes, so we not only do not butt on a narrow patch with competitors, but also save a lot.

We collect phrases for advertising

Since we need a lot of traffic, then the phrases also do not need 10 or even 100. They need at least several thousand. Therefore, we will not do it manually. Automation needed. Any parsing software by J. Wardstat or services with ready-made databases of key phrases will be suitable for collection.

What are we collecting? Phrases that describe (in any forms and combinations) :

• Services;
• Products;
• Problem;
• Products and services of competitors;
• Names of competing companies and their sites;
• Interests of potential clients (associative phrases from the right column of J.Wordstat). For example, if you want to sell a gadget for a car enthusiast, then he is interested in traffic police fines, changes in the rules, where the cameras are, etc.

How much we collect: at least several thousand phrases with popularity from 250-300 per month (there is no less sense, since Ya.Direkt simply cannot figure out where to show ads for such low-frequency phrases).

At the same stage, we understand whether it is worth doing this at all (by the number of phrases and the assessment of Ya. The directive of the audience size).

We make ads

Few people know that in Yandex.Direct, besides manually adding ads and Commander, there is upload and download in Excel format. This is super convenient when you have a lot of phrases and only a few ads of the same type.

By the way, how to work with unloading xls, texts, pictures and other, there are plenty of resources. We will not dwell on this.

I will clarify only a few points:

• In the ads, be sure to add a motivating picture, because in YAN, the desire to click strongly depends on this;
• The picture for the ad will be displayed at a minimum rate of 3 rubles;
• We make several ad options for the same key phrases in order to maximize traffic;
• We put on the rest of the landing page "quick links".

After moderation, we drop money on the balance of the advertising campaign and stock up on popcorn.

We look at attendance and track feedback.

How to determine that traffic is really targeted (using Ya.Metriki):

1. People are not fools and understand that they are moving on an ad to a site where they will offer to buy something;
2. The percentage of refusals is not much higher than the head-on advertising for exact hot phrases directly related to the product / service (you can simultaneously launch such a campaign to make sure my words are true);
3. The time spent on the pages - from a minute or more;
4. We selectively review the web-visor and make changes to the landing pages;
5. The presence of stable feedback - letters, call recordings, etc.

Example of the result (this is just about the construction of private houses)

Dynamics:



Audience quality:



Calls:

Results

This, of course, is not a silver bullet, but a good option to quickly understand whether your new business has a right to exist.

To summarize, what is the advantage of this approach, unlike the classics?

1. This is fast (it is clear that there are still businesses with seasonality, but ...) - only 1-2 weeks;
2. The cost of research is from 20-30 thousand rubles, including the cost of landing pages and advertising;
3. Reliable data - the volume of the audience, the behavior on the site, contacts of real buyers;
4. We learn a lot about how your products are actually used;
5. There is a real understanding of the cost of advertising and exhaust in terms of sales;
6. Expanded audience coverage;
7. Web analytics data on how to improve your advertising campaign and website.

The next stages of the “multi-path” are the study and launch of a full-fledged site / business taking into account the statistics obtained.

How do you do the research?