Market Research

For our market research, we firstly defined our focus group and then we looked for existing researches on that market. The focus group of IDM Agency is explained in a previous post of mine, called Researching the Market:

" IDM Agency's Market is consisted from all the potential buyers of our service. Since we are a Business to Business (B2B) company our market is all the businesses which Could buy our product.

Doing a research on that, we concluded that some of the characteristics of our market are going to be:
1) Small-scale companies, because of the low-cost of our services.
2) Have a website, because if the viral marketing reaches the consumer, he or she has to be able to find more information about the company we will be advertising.
3) Companies which are looking for increasing their reputation (measured by number of views of their website) and their sales. "

 Afterwards we did a secondary research based on existing market researches for Online SMBs (small or medium businesses) to found the market segmentation as well as trends and and areas we should focus to. We retrieved many useful information from the following reports:

- Social Media Marketing Industry Report - How marketers are using social media to grow their businesses.

- Software Sales Business Plan, Market Analysis

We gathered some of our findings in this word document:

* Market Research findings *

Branding

Last Tuesday we had a session about branding with the owner of Together Innovation company. We were given an illustration about Apple and asked to "shape" its branding profile. The illustration is the following:

The branding values and vision we made for Apple is below (please click to englarge):

Personal vision and values
Qualities: Effectiveness, Order, Aesthetics. Essence: Work hard to "play" hard. Vision: Find my dream job and get it within the next year. Mission: Pay back the money my family invests to me. Values: Honesty, communicative.

IDM's vision and values
Our company's vision and values is shown below (please click to enlarge):

IDM's branding brief
We want to develop a clean-cut and fresh brand for our agency. We'll try to pass the feeling of cool and serious at the same time, by aspiring the principles of modernism in every aspect of our company; website, advertising content, premises. The strategy we will follow is mainly around promoting ourselves using the services we offer which is the viral way online.

First Formative Presentation

Last Tuesday my team and I presented our business idea and the steps we have done thus far. Our presentation is available here:

* First Formative Presentation IDM Agency (Powerpoint) *

The presentation includes an explanation of our idea and the services we are going to offer. Also the Market research along with the industry research we did for online advertising. At the presentation we showed the profit and loss 3 year forecast, the cashflow we estimate we're going to have as well as the calculation of our start-up budget. We finished our presentation with the Gantt chart pointing out the stages we completed and the ones that are going to follow (all the spreadsheets are available here).

Feedback
The oral feedback we received was encouraging. The disadvantages were that we confused the Porter's 5 Forces analysis with the SWOT analysis; the 5 forces analysis is applied to industries (in our case it should be applied to the online advertising industry) while we applied it to our own business idea, so that was more of a SWOT analysis. Overall we received positive feedback for the structure and design of our presentation  and the methodology we follow.

Cashflow statement forecast

We did a cash-flow statement forecast for the first year of our company. It is available below:

* Cash flow forecast statement (Excel Spreadsheet) *

A screenshot (please click to enlarge):

Profit and Loss forecast

My team and I created a Profit and Loss forecast statement for the first three years. In the Excel file below we have a 12-month forecast for each year in 3 different spreadsheets.

* Profit and Loss (36 months) statement (Excel spreadsheet) *

We decided:
1) to look for angel investors and other similar resources to gather our start-up budget since it is not very high, and
2) to hire employees before when our sales exceed £ 1,000.

Who are we? (Our services)

Elevator Pitch
We (Ikbal, Ray and me) are the IDM Agency and we deliver cost-effective digital advertising using viral marketing in social networks focusing on helping online start-up (small-scale in general) companies.

Our Services
For a long time now my team and I, have been thinking about the services our agency should provide. We have been exploring the power of Viral Marketing in social networks trying to find ways we could cause the "buzz" intentionally for a client.

The services we are going to offer initially are:
 1  Create a Facebook page so whenever there is an offer regarding the client, to message all the fans of the company encouraging them to re-post the message.
 2  For the same reason we create a Twitter account.
 3  Promote video-commercials in youTube and in case they don't have any, we co-operate with video production companies for that purpose.
 4  Create a buzz in websites such as "answers.com" and "confuse.com" replying at all the relevant questions. The great advantage of those sites are that they come very high in the search results.
 5  Use "www.BackType.com" to find the communities in which we could spread the message of our customer and use commenting to do that.

This is a list of our initial services. We expect as the time goes by and we gain experience to expand and mostly optimise them.

Researching the market

IDM Agency's Market is consisted from all the potential buyers of our service. Since we are a Business to Business (B2B) company our market is all the businesses which Could buy our product.

Doing a research on that, we concluded that some of the characteristics of our market are going to be:
1) Small-scale companies, because of the low-cost of our services.
2) Have a website, because if the viral marketing reaches the consumer, he or she has to be able to find more information about the company we will be advertising.
3) Companies which are looking for increasing their reputation (measured by number of views of their website) and their sales.

Now we are looking on finding even more characteristics of our market and afterwards the size of this market. Also we're going to do an estimation of the share we're going to cover.