Image Generated Using Cool Text – Create Your Own

I was recently presented with the question, “Any tips on how startup entrepreneurs can innovate?”

While the question was posed in a broad sense, I thought about this from the angle of search engine marketing and social media marketing.

It didn’t feel sufficient to simply say “engage in search engine marketing” or “participate in social media marketing”.  Maybe at one time that would have been considered innovative.  But now it’s simply part of a good marketing mix.

Here are some thoughts on how entrepreneurs might leverage search engines, search engine data, and social media (in this case, blogging) to inspire innovation:

Keyword Research to Inform Product Functionality Direction

There are a number of ways that startup entrepreneurs can leverage all of the rich information that search engines provide.  Entrepreneurs looking to provide innovative products and solutions can look at the language people use in search of the “right” fit.

A good starting place is using Keyword Research tools to analyze how people search.  There are a number of tools out there to do this.  The most popular (and most effective) is using Google’s Keyword Research Tool that is part of having an AdWords account.  The second best thing is using Google’s free Keyword Tool.

Let’s say that a startup company is providing technology for “customer relationship management”.  A starting place would be to type this phrase into Google’s Keyword Tool.

At first glance, you would simply see a long list of potential search phrases that are very similar to what you typed in.  But, if you look closely, and make your way down the list of suggestions that Google provides, you would notice that a few vertical markets start to crop up in the list.  “Hotel” and “Banking” are two of the most obvious in the list provided by Google.  The untrained eye might ignore these suggestions.  But, an innovative entrepreneur might see that people are out there looking for vertical solutions.

The next step would be to brainstorm a list of potential vertical markets that might be targets for specific functionality for Customer Relationship Management software.  The entrepreneur would then begin using the Keyword Tool by typing in each of the individual markets on their list, in combination with “customer relationship”, “customer management”, “customer software”, “CRM”, etc.

For a basic search for “customer relationship management”, in combination with “Hotel” would yield an average of 28 searches per month.  “Bank” would yield 73 searches per month, “Banking” would yield 976 per month, “Financial” would yield 91 per month, “Insurance” would also yield 91 per month, “Real Estate” would yield 58 per month, “Manufacturing” would yield a “not enough data” response (meaning next to nothing), etc.

(While the keyword volumes listed above are low, a thorough use of the tool would yield many possible combinations of these words, and the aggregate volume is what would provide the direction.)

From this high-level search, the entrepreneur might see that there is a niche in Financial Services, and specifically in the Banking sector.

On a separate track, through the same Keyword Research process, the entrepreneur might also have noticed that there are a significant number of people searching for “international” CRM solutions.

Next steps would be to move beyond that Keyword Research.

Look At How the Search Engines Are Listing Results

Let’s assume that the entrepreneur then decided to examine what kinds of companies and websites are coming up in search results for “Banking” customer relationship management.

By typing in “banking customer relationship management” into Google, and by picking through the search results (SERPs), you would see that Microsoft, IBM/Cognos, and Sunguard all are listed on the first page of results.  This would lead you to look at the product/service offerings of each of these companies (and others you may find).

A refined search for “banking CRM” would yield a whole host of additional companies to evaluate.  You can now begin a more basic market research approach to catalog what these providers offer, and measure up how you might be able to move into that sector with innovative ideas.

Looking for Reviews, Opinions & Influential Contacts – What Are Bloggers Saying?

In the same “Banking” scenario, the innovative entrepreneur would be looking for additional information about the opportunities in this sector.  A great place to find written material and, more importantly, influential contacts and advisers, is by finding blog articles on the topic.  There are a number of ways to look for bloggers/blog content.  Technorati.com is one place.  Another quick way to use Google, is by using Google’s Blog Search.

By searching for “banking CRM” in Google Blog Search, you would find a number of blog posts on the subject.  After reading through what people are saying about the topic, the entrepreneur would make sure to begin personally contacting the bloggers to engage in a dialogue that would produce valuable information about the market potential for targeting this segment, learn about strengths and weaknesses of current offerings on the market, and develop a list of personal contacts that can become advisers and that can help with future promotion efforts.

There are many, many other ways to leverage search engines to gather information about innovative ideas, but these three are great starting places.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under General. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Bookmark and Share
del.icio.us | Digg it | Reddit | StumbleUpon