Social media marketers will tell you that using social media to reach out to customers during times of economic depression offers an excellent return on investment. The overhead is relatively minimal (consisting mostly of time commitment) and the potential value is huge (cultivating a loyal consumer base). But we live in a cynical world, my friends, and everyone has an angle – even people in marketing. (I know!) So if you’re thinking of jumping into social media or ramping up your current efforts, you’ll of course want to do some research into social media on your own. Here are some places to start.

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There’s a new(ish) advertising tool called quick response codes that has been getting some press recently. They’re basically barcodes that are readable by web-enabled cell phones and point people to particular Web sites. So you could include a quick response code in a paper advertisement, for example, and people who scanned that code into their phone would go directly to your site where they could purchase whatever you’re advertising. The technology is being billed as a bridge between the real and virtual worlds.

Being an expert on neither, I can only recommend the following articles for a quick and informed introduction to how it all might work:

RU Ready 4 QR Codes from Multichannel Merchant 

The Scannable World: Mobile Phones as Barcode Scanners from Read Write Web 

Mainstream America is Ready for Bar Codes – Converging ‘RealSpace’ and ‘MobileSpace’ from David Harper’s Different Things 

To me, when I hear “bridge between real and virtual worlds,” I think Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. So it’ll probably be a lot like that. But with more commerce. And fewer talking animals.

Two recent surveys shed conflicting light on advertising expenditures in our slumping economy.

The Association of National Advertisers released the results of a survey at the end of August noting that over half of the respondents see cuts coming to their ad budgets in the next six months. Areas most targeted by these cuts include media and production budgets, travel, and new project acquisition.

Meanwhile, a study from the Kelsey Group finds that the “current economic climate has not diminished the advertising plans of small and medium-sized businesses.” In fact, the study finds that 81% of those businesses surveyed intend to maintain or increase ad spending.

This kind of conflicting data puts advertising agencies in a bit of a pickle. How to plan? How to project? It also leaves small businesspeople at a loss when trying to figure out how much their competition is likely spending on ads. So what is to be done? The way forward may be the safe way. The Center for Media Research, where I found both of these reports and which, as an aside, is an excellent resource for free (registration required) market research, suggests spending advertising budgets “wisely.”

But how? What does that mean? Well, here’s what we at the Hill Library think: To advertise wisely, you should get to know your potential customers through secondary research as much as possible before attempting to reach out to them directly. Advertising wisely also means benchmarking your ad spending against long-term industry averages. And once you’ve done this external research, advertising wisely involves looking at your own interactions with your existing customers. Combining these external and internal views can help you create the targeted, financially responsible advertising plan most likely to reap returns in the most efficient manner.

And here’s how to get started…

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Here’s a test: When I say “psychographics,” don’t think of Anthony Perkins. Ahh, I always fail, too.

Psychographics, like demographics, can help you research your customers. But where demographic research looks at recognizable and quantifiable characteristics of people (like age, sex, or educational attainment), psychographics are focused on psychological or sociological characteristics. So demographics can show you the median income of people in a particular place, and psychographics can hint at how they feel about spending that income. Psychographic research can also tell you how the things consumers buy fit into an overall consumer lifestyle. 

We generally beat demographic data into the ground here on the blog (and must drive a good portion of the total traffic to the American FactFinder, if only out of sheer repetitiveness), so today we’ll just focus on resources to find psychographic information.

If you’d like to create a more focused marketing or business plan by learning more about potential customers’ buying patterns, consumer preferences, personal interests, and lifestyles, read on. 

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You may have heard of Google’s new product Knol, which is being billed as a competitor to Wikipedia. It has been around for some time in a closed beta, but this week was opened to the public. One would basically use Knol in the same way one would Wikipedia – by creating and editing entries on just about any topic under the sun – but Knol gives more ownership of the entry to the initial creator than does Wikipedia.

So when I created an entry on business research yesterday (Business Research: What it is, and where to find it), I also created an account that gives the Hill Library’s information as the content creator. Will this give the Library any additional authority in the eyes of people looking for business research online? Who knows.

Could your business use Knol to display specific industry knowledge? Absolutely. Especially for niche operations, this seems like a great way to spread content across the Web. There’s even been some speculation that Google will display Knol results above Wikipedia results in its search engine. That seems like a dastardly practice, but is something to keep in mind.  

For another (better than ours) example of a small business-focused Knol, check out The Size of the Small Business Market, by Anita Campbell of SmallBizTrends.com.

Drop us a line if you write a Knol yourself, and help us out with ours by leaving comments and suggestions on the site.

By 2050, the Hispanic population in the U.S. will grow by 188 percent, according to the Census Bureau. That’s a total of 102.6 million people, or 24.4 percent of the projected 2050 population. Clearly, that’s a big piece of the American consumer pie, and an intriguing prospective customer base for many businesses. But the Hispanic consumer is not a completely unified being. There are first-generation families, and third-generation families. There are consumers from Mexico, Central America, and South America. A blanket approach to reaching out to this group of people as though they were all the same is probably a less than ideal strategy. So how can your business reach this growing group of consumers knowledgeably?

Well, we’ve got some ideas. Follow along as we look at where Hispanic-origin consumers are located in the U.S., what they spend their money on, and how to best reach out to them via the Internet.

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If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet in the last couple of days you know the new iPhone is on sale today. There’s already lots of excitement around the new apps available, along with lots of disappointment about technical difficulties. One dedicated tech guy has even been lovingly streaming his first 24 hours with the device.

Clearly iPhone users are a tad more geeked-out than your average consumer; anecdotal evidence abounds to back this up. But what can we learn using concrete data about the people who’ve purchased and are using iPhones? Today we’ll walk through just some of the available statistics on iPhone usage. If you’re a marketer, you might use this info to help your clients move into the rapidly expanding mobile space. If you’re a small businessperson, you might use this info to more knowledgeably “go it alone” into mobile advertising. And if you’re anybody with a Web site, you might take some of this to heart to get your site found on the mobile web – before it gets too crowded.

Follow along as we look at iPhone users: Who they are, what they do, and how to reach them.

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Any astute reader of this blog will know all too well how much we appreciate the U.S. Census Bureau. As a counter of just about every American resident and keeper of data on just about every U.S. industry, the Census Bureau is an indispensible source for business research. Take, for example, the American FactFinder. You can use this tool to find detailed statistics about the people in any U.S. place. It’s authoritative, it’s comprehensive, and it’s free.

While it’s great to know that x% of the people in your community share x characteristic, the implications of that for your business can be less than clear. It’s a gap we try to help people span here at the library all the time: I’ve got all these great statistics, now how can I use them to further my business?

It’s a problem of turning data into knowledge.

We try to help folks with this on an individual level, but a great recent article in AdAge magazine can help in general, as well. The article, titled The Changing Face of the U.S. Consumer, looks at trends in the U.S. population (with data mined from the Census Bureau) and provides strategies to turn them to your business’s advantage. It’s a great example of how to turn data into knowledge, and a highly recommended read.

(via ResourceShelf)