Market Research And Inventory Tips For Business

Market Research And Inventory Tips For Business

Sean: All right. The next question is from Patrick. How do you do market research for your business? What are the factors to consider to have a business that has a market?

One easy way is actually to put the keyword for that business. So for example, if you’re selling Taho, maybe put that keyword on Google and see how many people are actually searching for Taho. So I’m going to go ahead and open an incognito tab and share that screen with all of you. This is just one way to do it. I’m not saying this is how you should be doing it. So yeah. Why not Taho?  Right?

Calories, benefits. Okay. Vendor is there, right? It’s one of the, what? Top one, top two, top three, top four, top five, top six, top seven. It’s a top seven most searched for keyword when you type for Taho. And then for the eighth and ninth, you just know these three, these four, actually these four right here, these are people looking for the Taho. So do you have a market? Probably, yes. Right there and then that could be one part of your market research.

You also have other tools that you can use. For example, like SEMrush. Just a disclaimer, I’m an affiliate. SEMrush is a partner of mine. I love their software and if you want to use it, you can use my link in the website: from.seo-hacker.com/semrush. Yeah so you have the keyword research here, or you can use the Keyword Magic Tool. I just go usually for a Keyword Magic Tool. The Philippines would be the country and you put in Taho. So right here, you would be able to see, oh, there’s 33,000 searches every month for the word Taho. What’s happening in there?

So you could take off like south, chevy. These are not the words you want, because obviously these are keywords from the US. Right? So just exclude them from the results. You can do that. Yeah. And then you could just zone in on the keywords that you might want. Like the vendor. Definitely that’s one. So there’s a thousand searches per month for that. Strawberry Taho, probably. Homemade Taho, yes, probably.  Strawberry Taho Baguio, yeah.

And then you add up all of the volume and you get an idea right now that, oh, probably we have like, I don’t know, 15,000 searches every month. That’s a pretty good number. If I can service that with a website where people can order Taho and I can deliver it to them at home. Perfect. Then you have a working business. That’s one easy way to do it. So Patrick. I hope I added value to you by showing you exactly how I’m going to do it. Yeah. That’s how I do it.

Why don’t I do more business if I know how to do it this way? I can’t manage more people and more and more businesses. That’s the easy answer. I’m already giving my best a hundred percent with SEO Hacker. So just choose the business that you’re going to give your all to. Focus on that. Right? You can’t split yourself too much.

Another question from Patrick, can you give us some tips on how to manage your inventory as a small business?

Apple: We are not doing this for SEO Hacker. So I’m going to answer this question from my previous job or my previous work. I used to work for my dad for 11 years. And the company name is Meiji Electric. So number one, how I did it was to make sure I knew the ballpark. How many sales per month do I have? And I projected based on how much budget I have. And so I try to stretch that as to how far I can go so that we don’t run out of stocks. And that we also make sure that, just in case like this, an ECQ happened, so lockdown, no shipments are supposed to happen. So we have some leeway as to when no shipments could be allowed. So there’s that.

So you manage the sales and then you multiply it to how long you would want. So let’s just use, for example, a mug. The mug that you’re selling. Okay. So your mug sells, for example, 200 pieces per month. It’s quite low. Right? You want to make sure that you at least have a thousand in the next six months. So that’s how I do it. Of course, you have to monitor your inventory. Where does it go? So you have a system or we outsource the service of an inventory system. So we have that, making sure that, you know the ins, the outs, where does it go, and if there will be pilferages, or damages to your products, that also goes back into the inventory. So things like that. I hope I was able to answer your question, Patrick.

Sean: All good. So for me managing inventory, actually Apple could answer it a lot better because that one, I don’t have a lot of experiences. I know I’m selling aquarium plants and Crustaceans, but that’s actually super simple. If I ran out of plants to harvest, I would just mark it sold out in my ecommerce store. If I run out of shrimps that my next batch haven’t given birth to yet, I’ll mark it as sold out in my ecommerce store.

But if you’re asking this on a bigger scale, like how you’re going to rotate your money and capital by ordering inventory, this is as much as I know. I haven’t experienced this. JIT or just in time. Make sure if your stock is running out because your item is sellable based on historical data, you should have an upcoming shipment to answer those. Because you don’t want to lose sales just because you’re out of stock.

That is if you’re rolling capital on inventory. And assuming again, it’s nonperishable, that’s the best way to do it – JIT, just in time. Because you don’t want to order stuff ahead of time and it’s going to be sleeping in your warehouse because the items don’t run out fast in malls or whatever you’re selling it with. That’s going to be the sleeping capital. Capital should be making money and it’s not making money. So that is how I’m going to be doing it, theoretically, if I ever get the chance to run a business that requires capital and inventory.

From Len, how much time do you and your management team spend on generating revenue?

The main point person in the company that generates revenue, that’s going to be me. So I am the one tasked to close deals. And the company supports me by helping me draft the proposal, the contract, the pitch in terms of design, ideation. But the general direction, strategy, execution, meeting, and the pitch per se, I’m the one doing that. So I spend maybe 50% of my day doing that almost every day. Yeah, maybe at least three or four working days a week. That’s what I do. So 50% of that.

So I do spend a lot of time trying to generate revenue and that’s because we just want to make sure that we secure the lives of 50 individuals working in the company. We don’t want to risk that. We don’t want it to happen that if we lose two to three clients tomorrow, we’re panicking already. We want to have that peace of mind. I mean, this is the reason why you’re going to do business. That’s the reason why people invest in life insurance. That’s the reason why we have our emergency fund. That’s the reason why we invest in the stock market with money that we’re only willing to lose. It’s because at the end of the day, the goal is peace of mind. It’s not to make more money. It’s not to make a disgusting amount of wealth. It’s to have peace of mind.

From Mitch. What is the future of digital marketing in the country? Is it going to be the new product or service other countries would outsource to us on a massive scale, like customer service? Or like BPO, right?

So I believe that the future of digital marketing in the country is actually the country going digital. What do I mean? A lot of companies actually haven’t gone digital yet. The numerous companies that are sadly dying off or having a very difficult time right now, is because a lot of them have not gone digital. They have no digital solutions.

I keep saying this in my webinars that I ran last year, whether public webinars or private. People still want the WHAT. Whatever it is you’re selling, whatever it is you’re giving out as a service, people still want that. They still want your ramen and they still want your taho. They still want whatever it is that you have to offer.

Guess what? It hasn’t changed. You know what’s changed? How are they going to get it? Because right now it’s ECQ. We can’t go out, you have to have a pass, whatever. There’s so many reasons. Or you’re risking your neck out there. If you go out there, you might get the virus, you might bring the virus home, whatever. These are the friction points. These are the stoppers for people getting the WHAT but they still want the WHAT.

Now the companies that were able to address those friction points and actually got to HOW.  How are we going to do that? How are we still going to serve them with the WHAT? How are we going to get it to their hands? And how are they going to pay us? How are we going to get that money and still make revenue and make sure that we make a profit at the right time? Companies who were able to address the HOW, a lot of them, are because they went digital.

So I’m not going to tell you that we’re going to be the digital marketing capital of the world. That’s going to be the future. That’s going to be the vision. No. Just look here right at home. There are so many companies that have not gone digital. So the future of digital marketing in the Philippines is going digital. Sounds so redundant, right? You know, being knee deep, more than a decade, been doing digital marketing for more than a decade in this country. SEO, social media marketing, website development, and design, pitches, you name it. I’ve done it, most probably done it.

The digital gap in our country is huge and it’s still big. And the wave is just the beginning. So that is where we are. I’m not even going to gun for companies or in other countries. Right here in the Philippines, there’s a huge opportunity. We’re all going in the same direction.

Apple: Yeah. And I think we should serve our countrymen first. We should serve our countrymen first and foremost, before we serve other countries. Right?

Sean: Yeah. It’s also more difficult to serve businesses outside because of different cultures, different ways of working, and different ways of speaking or talking with you. You know, sometimes the way they look at Filipinos like us, I know I look Chinese, I’m Fil-Chi, but mostly I’m Pinoy, so the way they look at Filipinos is very different.

Apple: Plus time difference.

Sean: Yeah. Plus that.