Business Information for Entrepreneurs by an Entrepreneur

Entrepreneurs have always worked evenings and weekends.  You can see in our web log below that traffic to morebusiness.com spikes around 9:00 a.m. and then climbs again between 8:00 pm and midnight.  (Each colored bar in the charts represent a metric related to traffic from our stats tool, AWStats. For this post, the details of each bar aren't as important as the trend.)

Many of you can probably relate to this.  When I started my businesses, I spent long hours over a long period of time doing research, building a customer base and managing all of the details in getting established.

MoreBusiness.com hourly traffic (U.S. Eastern time), March 2011

My brother and I planted the seeds for morebusiness.com back in 1994 and in 1996 launched it as a full blown site after seeing site traffic grow steadily.  We have built several other businesses since then, among them MailerMailer, our email marketing service.

As the publisher, I peruse our web traffic statistics regularly.  Every week, traffic to morebusiness.com is always high Monday through Wednesday, takes a little dip on Thursday and Friday and then goes a bit lower over the weekend.  The numbers seem logical.  Small business owners are usually energized at the beginning of the week to try and accomplish as much as they can.  Our web site is full of resources to help them with their business so it makes sense that traffic is higher earlier in the week.

A New Trend?

I've always seen business traffic dip on Saturdays and Sundays, with Sundays being only slightly higher than Saturdays.  I could relate to that.  Saturdays represent a nice breakpoint to recharge, buy groceries, do the laundry, take the kids to their soccer games, you know the drill.

Then, a while ago I noticed spikes occuring on Sundays.  I started to monitor our weekend numbers more closely.  For a solid year and a half, our Sunday traffic has been within 4% of our Friday traffic.

MoreBusiness.com traffic by day of week, March 2011

The numbers were telling me that more people were doing research online on Sundays. Saturdays still continue to be the lightest work day, but Sundays are extremely close to Friday levels of web activity.  A disclaimer: this is not an in-depth study examining the work patterns of business owners.  Rather, it is trend information backed by data: our morebusiness.com's web log files revealing traffic patterns to our popular site designed specifically for entrepreneurs and small businesses.

What Does This Mean?

What can you do this information?  If you are small business owner, you know that it can be lonely.  Your friends and family who haven't gone through the same rigor may not appreciate why you drive yourself to work so hard.  So my fellow entrepreneurs, look at the data - when you're burning the midnight oil or working on Sunday afternoon, take solace in the fact that you are not alone.

Your holiday marketing plan should be complete and getting into full swing for the end of this year. If you are selling your products or services online, part of your holiday marketing plan should include search engine marketing, or SEM.

This time of year, the competition is fierce for online marketing. You need strategies that will get your message to the right people, but not cost a sleigh of money. Here we provide three tips to get you started on forming your strategy.

1. Set Up Your Metrics Tracking

   You will not know how your online marketing campaigns are working without exact numbers. Be sure you establish tracking for the metrics that are important to you. That might include:

   • PPC Conversion - Get the numbers from the search engines where you have set up pay per click (PPC). They will let you know how many clicks you receive from your ads, and more specifically, how many clicks result in a sale. This can be established through PPC codes provided by the search engine that you place within the code of your website.
   • Secondary Metrics Tracking - You can also set up with search engines to determine how many clicks result in secondary, or non-revenue, events, such as a newsletter signup, brochure requests, etc.
   • Other Banner Ad Tracking - If you set up banner or text ads on other websites, be sure you get the tracking codes from that affiliate so you can track the effectiveness of those ads.

2. Increase SEM Messages

   Using those metrics we mentioned, it is always a good idea to test different messages to see which one works the best. That may require a small increase in your PPC budget, but the better results in sales can easily offset that expense in the long term.

   Test at least two different PPC messages. For instance, you might try one that offers free shipping and one without. Test the results and then go with the one that works the best.

3. Increase Email List Mailings

   You may use your customer email list to send out regular newsletters throughout the rest of the year, but during the holiday sales period, you should utilize that list more frequently to provide notices of sales, promotions, reminders, etc. Don't forget to provide a link to your website, and as always, check those metrics!

The term "market research" may raise hairs on the back of some business owners' necks. As the 'Down-n-Dirty' part of marketing, market research is where you must get your hands soiled to get results. No one really likes to do it, and that's why it is usually delegated to a third party company.

However, you can gain a great deal of valuable knowledge from the data collected from market research. Here are a few DIY tips to guide you on your way.

Types of Market Research

First you must understand the two main types of market research: Primary and Secondary. Primary research is the data you collect through your own efforts. Every question you ask, every survey you design and send, all comes back as current data that pertains most to your business. Primary data can be gathered by:

• Surveys
• Interviews
• Questionnaires
• Focus groups
• A simple question as your customers leave your store

Secondary market research is data you can use for your business purposes, but has already been collected by someone else. You can analyze secondary data to get good knowledge and insight to a particular marketing problem, but it is not as strong as primary source data.

Secondary data may include:

• US Census Data
• National Survey Reports
• Studies published in trade journals

Goal of Collecting Data

Your goals for collecting primary market research data are to get the most unbiased and statistically probable information possible. Therefore, you may want to avoid these mistakes:

• Using only friends, family, and acquaintances - This leads to biased data. It's not that their opinions don't count, but you need much more raw data from unbiased subjects.
• Using only secondary data - While secondary data is great to research, collect, and analyze, it doesn't get to the root of your own marketing problem.
• Looking at raw data - All those hundreds, or even thousands, of questions mean nothing if you can't find trends. Enter your data into statistical software like an Excel spreadsheet to find majority opinions, create graphs and charts of trends, and even colorize your data to help you make the best decisions.

Whether you are trying to launch a new product or simply changing your branding colors, market research gives you the hard data to help make the best decisions for your company. So why not do it yourself whenever you can?