7 Ways to Do Product Research For Your Marketing and Advertising

To successfully sell a product, you must know exactly what consumers want.

There's no shortcut to sales and advertising. You cannot simply slap a clever headline or fancy design on to your ad just to make your readers or client feel good and hope to get away with it.

You have to know exactly what it is that you're selling. To do that, you have to research as much as you can about the product and become an expert in that category - someone who can offer solutions that save consumers' time, effort and money.

Here's a checklist to help you do your product research:

1. Learn more about the product and how it works

Use the product. If you're writing about health supplements, sample them. If you're promoting a clothing brand, wear the clothes. Selling party tickets? Go attend an event and get a first-hand feel of the party atmosphere. Nothing beats personal experience.

2. Interview your client or the maker of the product

Get as much as information as you can from your client about the product. Interview marketing staff, talk to the boss. Get and study product brochures or any form of marketing material from both your client and the competition.

3. Ask local retailers what they think about the product and the competition

Retailers are always keen to give you constructive feedback about the competitive advantages and disadvantages about your client's brand and product.

4. Find out what actual consumers think. Ask questions.

One of the best ways to learn more about a product is by word of mouth. Ask consumers what they do or don't like about the product. Why do they choose or avoid it? What does it do for them? What would make them buy it?

5. Check the Internet and other sources of online information

Type key words related to your product or its category into search engines and go where the results lead. Join social media networks such as Facebook fan pages and discussion groups to see what gets people talking about the product.

6. Learn about the product category

If you're writing an ad to sell music CDs of a particular genre, say, Rock for example, it'll be advantageous to find out more about that genre. Walk into a music shop and refer to Rock music magazines or surf the Internet. Study the language that Rock music fans use - what are some of the popular expressions and terms that you can adapt into your writing?

7. Visit the library

Refer to encyclopedias (How is Vodka made? How do you brew beer?), dictionaries (What's RAM? What's ROM?), audio and video material, or other valuable sources of information otherwise unavailable to you.

Reference Books: The Tool a Translator Can't Afford to Live Without

If you're on your way to becoming a translator or just someone who's learning a foreign language and takes this experience very seriously you know that there will never be enough reference materials available to suit your nonstop quest for knowledge.

Because the art of translating as well as the process of mastering a second tongue is a very complex process, you'll have to surround yourself with all sorts of resources from audio CDs and software programs that help you enunciate correctly to pillars of books that will help you solve the grammatical puzzles you'll surely encounter.

But before you go ahead and spend tons of money on the latest audio, video and computer products, sit back and think if you really have a good array of primary tools to start off with. This may seem simple, but for a translator -or anyone working with a second language- a set of dictionaries is essential.

Basically every translator needs a dictionary, right? Wrong! They need a complete set which includes a general dictionary, a synonyms-antonyms dictionary, a grammar reference guide, a translation dictionary, an encyclopedia -in the source and the target language-, several technical dictionaries (legal, medical, accounting, finance, since you never know what a project might require) and a slang dictionary.