Company Internet Marketing 2

This is a story worth reading. It might save you a lot of time and money. It’s about a special website that went live in early December. It was conceived then developed out of necessity and market research. Ian Campbell, the individual investor who created it was irritated doing financial research in a manner he found slow, tiresome and difficult to organize.

Campbell liked to manage his own stock portfolio. But he found it painfully time-consuming to do the analyses, pouring over piles of charts, other web sites, trying to make sense of all the inputs for so many different companies. Moreover, in many cases, the information he wanted and needed was not there.

He reasoned that there must

be thousands of investment advisers and other investors who like him craved a solution to this. During the last year, he has developed a website focused on Small Cap Canadian Mining and Oil & Gas stocks.

If you check out his personal credentials, you’ll find that for more than 35 years, Campbell has been viewed as a leading Canadian expert in the rendering of independent business valuation opinions. In fact, he wrote the definitive Canadian books on it. While doing my own research for this article, I found that Campbell has recently been honored by the Canadian Institute of Chartered Business Valuators. They have named an annual research grant after him, so his track record in this business speaks for

itself.

I asked Campbell why he conceived this particular website. He said that his starting point was that he believed that the better organized and complete the research data available to him the better would be his analysis, the more time he would have for analysis and decision making, the lower would be his investment risk, the higher would be his potential investment returns, and the more meaningful would be his communication with other individual investors and investment advisors. In essence, his own frustration with the data overload on the Internet, coupled with the untold hours it took him to manage his own portfolio, led him to realize there had to be a quicker, better way to do this.

As

a long-time marketer myself, I was particularly pleased to see that Campbell did not fall into the trap of building a service based only on his needs.

Campbell knew that he could show others how to save time and money with this new way of researching just as if they were a company acquirer. He also knew though, that this just wasn’t enough.

To test his site concept in depth, he had to conduct market research. He started by discussing the concept with the Presidents of twenty Small Cap Canadian Mining and Oil & Gas Companies. None had seen a site constructed in the manner Campbell proposed to construct his, and fifteen of those company Presidents offered to pay significant

annual fees just to have their companies data embedded in the website. Campbell then had a seasoned market researcher work with him to craft and distribute a detailed questionnaire directed at thousands of individuals in the U.S. and Canada. Each had at least $100K in the market and was interested in individually managing or having an investment adviser handle his portfolio. The actual ’service offerings’ in the final site concept were a direct result of this research. Importantly, that statistically valid market research said that if Campbell took money from the companies whose data is embedded in the website that the website would not be seen as independent and objective. Campbell then decided that even though companies were willing to pay to be included that he would not charge those companies fees of any kind.

But for me, a marketing consultant, it’s about how the website provides member access to an interesting, yet very efficient way of looking at one’s stocks. I compare this to what it must be like looking down on an investment from three different altitudes. First, there is the Macro-economic overview, as if you were a plane way up at 38,000 feet of altitude, looking down at the very big picture. Then there is the ongoing specific industry overview (viewed within the context of the macro-economic overview above). Finally, there are the individual companies within the specific industries featured on the site. This is comprised of

over 35 daily financial and stock market comparisons of these companies that are instantaneously accessible, and research summarized for each specific company - organized much as a corporate acquirer would organize it.

From my marketer’s viewpoint, this site allows one to look at the three key questions one must ask: (1) where is this company now? (2) Where do they say they want to be? By when? (3) How do they compare statistically with their peer companies, and what are their plans to get where they want to go?

Being able to look down from a 38,000 foot vantage point forces the stock researcher to become aware of and take into consideration all the other inputs that affect the competitive

environment in which each company has to operate.

From the mid-altitude point, the researcher is assisted by taking into consideration all the pertinent specific industry inputs, allowing them to decide for themselves whether or not this particular company has the ability and resources to move upwards…or not. The investor, or his advisor, can then make their own decisions about buying or selling.

Copyright, Roy MacNaughton, 2008

Roy MacNaughton is a business writer and coach. He’s a seasoned marketer, with more than 25 years of international experience, including eight years online. His specialty is finding investment “niches” that can be exploited and/or added to his own portfolio.

Check his blog at: http://www.UmarketingU.com

To learn more, go to: http://www.stockresearchdd.com