If you don’t even know what that IS, don’t worry–you’re not alone! LOTS of online marketers become confused when they start hearing terms like “segmentation strategy,” “niche marketing,” “demographic research,” and “psychographic research.”

Before you go into a keyword coma, though, recognize that you’ve simply GOT to know what this is all about and how to put it to work for your business, if you’re going to survive in this economy.

A new survey shows that marketers and small businesses increasingly “get it” about how important these things are and they’re changing their ways, rapidly and radically.

This survey, which asked 50 “leading marketers” and 741 small businesses about their marketing and research plans for 2009, showed several interesting things:

First, marketers are rapidly moving their efforts online, indicating that they would increase efforts in EVERY online tactic mentioned in the survey–including social networking and webinars.

Second, small businesses are doing more segmentation research so they can better target their customers.

Third, small businesses will be doing more surveys–which is what will give them the information they need to segment their lists so they can reach out to their customers in a meaningful way.

And here’s what’s really important: Online surveys and focus groups are ONLY types of research that small business marketers plan to INCREASE in 2009.

What does this mean for YOU?

Bottom line: If you aren’t doing surveys in your business, you need to start now–because your competition IS doing surveys.

The simple fact is, niche marketing is absolutely critical in this economy. And to do niche marketing effectively, to reach out to your customers in a more personal–and more effective–way, you have to know who your customers are, so that you can personalize your messages to them.

If you don’t know what % of your customer base is women, if you don’t know what % holds a college degree, if you can’t say how many make more than $75,000 per year, then you don’t have the information you need to come up with a segmentation strategy for your business.

Want proof of how important a segmentation strategy is? Here you go:

• In the first 30 days of an e-mail campaign, open rates for e-mails sent to lists that are targeted or “segmented” like this are as much as 20% higher, on average (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• In the first 30 days of a campaign, click rates for a campaign that uses segmented lists are double those for non-segmented lists (Marketing Sherpa, 2008).
• Segmenting your list can quadruple conversion rates (Jupiter Research, 2006)

This means that you need to do demographic research–which is just another term for answering all those questions I just mentioned.

You need to do psychographic research–marketing jargon for understanding the values, attitudes, and lifestyles of your customers.

You need to do customer loyalty research–so you understand how to keep customers buying, over and over again, once you’ve converted them.

And here’s the good news: You can do all of this, quickly and easily.

Put a customer profile survey in place and you can answer all those pesky questions about demographics and psychographics, so that you can connect with your customers and prospects in a completely new way.

It’s quick, it’s easy, and at MySurveyExpert, we’ve developed templates that will get you up and running, right away.

You don’t have to be left in the dust. We’re about to put a survey product on the market that will let you get a customer profile survey up and running in less than a week.

What’s more, you’ll have a survey system in place that will give you ALL the information you need, in all phases of your business.

You’ll generate testimonials and referrals, produce case studies, measure customer satisfaction–the list goes on and on.

If you’re ready to get started, if you understand that surveys are THE hottest marketing tool among small businesses right now, then sign up for our free e-course today to get started.

And if you want more information about what we’re up to with our new survey system, just leave a comment for us!

Increase Sales & Improve Your Business With Survey Research.

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