Marketing Research Analyst, I'm curious what the job entailed? I've heard of Market Research Analysts but not MarketING, so I guess I'm asking the difference or just an outline of what it was generally.
It was essentially the same role - the only difference was the title.
My role involved two aspects of marketing research: new product development and litigation support.
On the NPD side, I worked with a team to find untapped needs for our clients - usually in three phases. We would first conduct in-depth interviews with customers (usually 30-40 interviews). We would then go through all of those transcriptions and pick out all of the needs/problems they were experiencing in the client's particular area. After compiling and de-duping all of those needs, we would then create a survey and collect a few hundred responses from customers. From that survey, we could pinpoint which needs were (a) most important, and (b) not currently being met. That way, our client could then work with their engineering team to develop a suitable product.
The litigation support side was pretty distant from core marketing. I helped create surveys and collect data that companies could use to support their case in legal trials.
I'm heavily focused on setting up marketing right now. I have been on it as my sole focus for months, trying to dig out some scalable processes and procedures, so I am wondering if you came across any marketing processes in bigger companies.
I empathize with your situation. Almost every marketing result from Google will be geared toward individuals/small businesses, so it's difficult to find processes geared toward larger organizations.
To get that information, I would strongly recommend searching Google Scholar. Most academic research in marketing is geared toward larger organizations, so the results that show up in Google Scholar should hopefully be insightful.
I also have some friends that want to get traction for their books
Are there 5 places to look for big mistakes? Or a few good ideas to getting it to take off that you could suggest?
My biggest mistake was writing a book in the first place. There's some backstory to that answer, but it's interesting and useful for the discussion.
The Backstory
To give you the backstory, I had created a viral video ("chat roulette mind reading"), and I knew that I could create follow up videos that would generate a lot more views. So before creating those videos, I decided to write a book so that I would have a product to sell (which would give me an income stream to fuel my pursuit toward self-employment). I worked 80-90 hour weeks writing my book. And that lasted for months. Not fun at all.
Once I finally launched the book, I launched my follow up video which depicted me influencing people's thoughts (so that I could associate that video with my book on persuasion). I described my book in the description and posted a link to Amazon. The video generated about 120,000 views in the first week. Not bad. Not as good as I hoped, but still decent.
At the time, my naive self estimated a 0.5% conversion rate. In other words, out of every 100,000 people that watched the video, 500 people would buy my book. Welp, that's when reality hit me in the face. Out of the 120,000 people that watched the video, a total of 3 people purchased my book...a pretty defeating outcome based on the amount of work that I put in to my book.
The Takeaway
That was in October 2013. To date, I've sold over 10,000 copies of my book. But I can honestly say that a good portion of that outcome was due to luck.
Most sales - even today - come from people organically finding my book through Amazon. My pricing article reached 100,000 views, yet my book sales don't look any different than they normally do. That's not why I'm writing articles (or even participating on this forum).
So that leads to the first takeaway. Unless you already have a well-established platform, distribution is more important than marketing/advertising for books.
The second takeaway is this. Before writing a book, ask yourself
why you want to write it. Are you writing the book for money or credibility/authority?
If you care more about the immediate cash (perhaps to fuel the early stages of your business), you shouldn't write a book. You should create a more expensive product or service with higher margin. With a more expensive item, you don't need a large platform. You just need to generate a few sales to earn that immediate revenue. You'll also have more control over the marketing and distribution, rather than working your butt off and crossing your fingers that people will buy it.
On the other hand, if you care about establishing your credibility and authority, a book is a great way to go. Your book should ideally have (a) an enticing selling point for a mainstream audience, and (b) common search-conducive keywords so that people will organically find it through Amazon and other online stores.
