How much of your business is e-business? Have you been running your small business long enough to remember when business started with a "B" and not an "E"? Or did you start or buy your business within the past 10 years and you can not imagine how business operated without the e-business elements?
Just as e-business means there are more ways than you imagine to conduct and explode your business, it also means there are more ways customers are trying to get your attention than you may realize.
Customer communication is a two-way super highway. There are as many ways to listen to customers as there are ways for customers to tell us -- in words and daily activities, who they are and what they want, need, prefer and won't buy. That's millions of people multiplied by an average of hundreds of messages and actions, telling us directly and indirectly how to woo and wow them.
Who helps us gather, sift, sort, analyze and make sense out of these billions of ways that customers are trying to get our attention and tell us what we need to hear? Who takes tons of data and turns it into snappy graphics we love and use to support business plans, marketing proposals and sales presentations? Who helps us listen for customer needs?
One answer is eMarketer and I admit to feeding on a steady diet, since July 2000, of weekly news, statistics, interviews, and analysis of e-business and online marketing from nearly 2,000 research organizations, all organized in a searchable, downloadable database that fits right into the PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents we all know how to create. The newsletter is free and research reports are yours for a fee.
Depending on what you need to learn about the types and numbers of customers you serve now or need in order to grow your business, there are 31categories of information you can tap at eMarketer to get both the big picture view and useful details. We love resources that work just as well for small business as super-sized corporations. You'll find that in categories such as Business Statistics, Consumer Market Research, E-Business Trends, EMail Marketing, Emerging Technology Research, Internet Marketing Information, Internet Usage Statistics, Marketing Analysis, Marketing Research, and Online Marketing Data.
The immediate value of eMarketer hit again in June with the report they researched and published on "The Business of Blogging." If the answers to these questions are important to your business or linked to solutions you are presenting to your customers, eMarketer has just the report for you:
- What are the three main reasons blogs have not caught on with businesses?
- How many US businesses are currently blogging?
- How many plan to blog in the future?
- Should marketers tap into the blog market?
- How large is the blog audience?
- What are the dangers of blogging?
Finally, anything that helps us put our ear to the ground and anticipate the next rumble of change or opportunities is valuable. If you have your favorite resource or "regular read" that helps you peek into the future or anticipate which way your business and customers will zig or zag next, won't you comment here and thrill us all?
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