Having determined you niche and having tailored your marketing mix for them definitely increases your bottom line. It doesn’t mean however that you can stop looking around to see how else your brand can profit.

If you give some of your time to do regular market research, you might widen your Blue Ocean and create more opportunities for your brand. Most likely, there are segments within or close to your niche whose needs aren’t being addressed by anyone, including your competitor.

Paid surveys can help you do your research. You can come up with different sets of questions and have different aggregates respond. This way, you can get what you need from the right respondents. Below are the 3 aggregates with their differences and how paid surveys can help you find opportunity in each of them.

1. Present Aggregate

The present aggregate describes your current niche. These are the people who already have a relationship with your brand. With the help of paid surveys, you can weed out the less profitable customers from your most profitable customers so that you can better allocate your marketing efforts.

Paid surveys can also help you better understand who your best customers are, making it easier to look for the same type of people to add to your best customers’ database.

2. Competitive Aggregate

The competitive aggregate pertains to those who belong to your niche, but they currently patronize your competitors’ brands. Like your present aggregate, the competitive aggregate is made up of both loyal and passive customers of your competitors.

Paid surveys can help you understand what makes these people loyal to your competition, allowing you to realize where you’re falling short. On the flip side, paid surveys can help you realize what the competition lacks, so you can attract their passive customers.

3. Emerging Aggregate

The emerging aggregate is the most interesting of all, because the people in this aggregate still do not find a need for your brand or your competitors’. This is a fresh farm of potential customers.

Paid surveys can help you determine how to best approach these people so that you can introduce your brand ahead of your competition.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 12:18 pm and is filed under Paid Surveys. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.