Marketing research. How to test a business idea in 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, the entrepreneur needs an answer to just one question: “Will it trample or not?”. And only then, “if you trample, how much?” in the form of numbers and quick analytics, feedback from the first potential customers.

You can, of course, use the services of agencies and business analysts easier or write 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 will be zero.

I suggest a different approach. It does not matter whether it is an online store, a boutique in a shopping center or a new production - even before the launch, you can study demand, audience size and calculate the payback period of the project. Agree, it’s unpleasant to spend half a year on launching and advertising a business for half a year and several hundred thousand rubles (or even millions) to understand that he “didn’t shoot”.

My option is a "multi-way", but the implementation of only the first stage, which will be discussed, already answers the above question well.

What will we use? Of course, the Internet. Now everything is changing rapidly - the mood of customers, technology, design trends, 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 am aware that everyone is already sick of them, but we must save time;
2. Pouring traffic from contextual advertising J. Direct on them, but in a slightly different way than in classical landing ads;
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 most potentially popular and sold. And it’s for them to make landings.

Why a maximum of five? Because there can be only five links to one ad by Ya.Direct (including “quick links”) and we have only a week to time.

A good option is to use one of the popular designers to assemble 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 the landing page. It all depends on the expectations of your audience, so often a “cool” design will be a waste of time and money. It is unlikely that now you can surprise users with a beautiful picture.

Even this works (sometimes modern design just scares off): The



page is best done in a minimalistic way:

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

Pour traffic

An important point: we need a lot of traffic (a lot of this 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 selecting a used car is 4 rubles.

How to get a lot of cheap targeted traffic?

Here you need to remember that we will give advertising in Y. Direkt, which has a large affiliate network. The difference between advertising impressions in YAN from search results is that in the affiliate program 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 observe completely different ads depending on what you were looking for earlier.

Just in case, YAN 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 for 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 for a trip to work, at lunch - where is an inexpensive business lunch, and in the evening - from which to build a future home. This is called target condition.

What does this mean? The fact that if we advertise a construction company, we may well reach our target audience by showing ads for phrases that are not directly related to houses or have no relation to them at all. Such advertising in YAN will be completely missed.

I think the principle is clear?

Another nice point: advertising a business lunch and taxi is much cheaper than houses, so we not only do not butt on a narrow spot with competitors, but also save a lot.

We collect phrases for displaying ads

Since we need a lot of traffic, then phrases will also need not 10 or even 100. They need at least several thousand. Therefore, we will not do it manually. Automation required. For collection, any parsing software by Y. Wordstat or services with ready-made databases of key phrases are suitable.

What are we collecting? Phrases that describe (in any form and combination) :

• Services
• Products
• A 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.Vordstat). For example, if you want to sell a gadget for a car enthusiast, then he is interested in fines of the traffic police, changes in the rules, where the cameras stand, etc.

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

At the same stage, we understand whether it is worth doing this at all (according to the number of phrases and the estimate of I. Direct audience size).

We make announcements

Few people know that in Direct, in addition to manually adding announcements and Commander, there is an upload and download in Excel format. This is super convenient when you have a lot of phrases and just a few similar ads.

There are tons of resources on how to work with xls unloading, texts, pictures, and more. We will not dwell on this.

I will clarify only a few points:

• Be sure to add a motivating image to the ads, as 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 variations of ads for the same key phrases in order to maximize traffic;
• We put “quick links” on other landing pages.

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

We watch attendance and track feedback

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

1. People are not stupid and understand that they are switching through an advertisement to a site where they will offer to buy something;
2. The rejection rate is not much higher than that of “head-on” ads for exact hot phrases directly related to a product / service (you can run such a campaign in parallel to make sure the truth of my words);
3. Time spent on pages - from a minute or more;
4. We selectively look at the web visor and make changes to the landing pages;
5. The presence of stable feedback - letters, call records, etc.

Example result (this is just about building private houses)

Dynamics:



Audience quality:



Calls:

Summary

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

To summarize, what is the advantage of this approach in contrast to the classics?

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

The following stages of “multi-way” are the development and launch of a full-fledged website / business, taking into account the statistics obtained.

How do you conduct research?