I've got a gig writing a tagline for a company...but I'm having trouble finding out a whole lot about the industry. I normally do a lot of my research on forums...finding out what the target responds to and what they're looking for. But this is for one-time customers, selling bike tours in big cities.

I've got a good idea of the demographics. I'm looking through competitors and I'll be calling a few of them, but where do I go from there to find out more about what motivates the market?

Do you have access to the SRDS? Most Libraries have one.

I could probably get it, but would that help me find info on someone renting bikes for city tours?

Eric:

Whenever I write copy, the majority of the time, the client has already done a great deal of market research in advance.

Above and beyond any research the client provides me, I find industry trade publications to be a tremendously helpful source of research.

Dale King

DAMSTRAAT RENT A BIKE AMSTERDAM

Eric,

Is the company you are writing for locally or nationally? If it's local, then that's easy. Just pick another city that they aren't located in and do a Google local search. That would give you some non-competitive companies to interview and study.

Hope that helps,

Mike

Spend some time on the phone and REALLY interview the client.

Or better yet see if the client can put you in touch with one or two of their customers and interview them.

Too often we as copywriters (particularly online copywriters) want to do all of our research via the Internet, email, etc.

But, most of the time you can gain incredible insights into your target market simply by talking to a few people on the phone and asking open ended questions.

Eric (Graham)

Thanks all for the advice.

Seconded. I find that these are far and away the most useful strategies -- instead of just shooting around in the dark, you can get some very specific information this way. It's a huge timesaver. One common practice is the questionnaire (I call this the "client pre-game") -- there are some threads on this board with really great examples of good questions to ask (Michel's is public).

One minor caution, though: when you're talking to a client, you might have to dig around a little bit to get to the bottom of what is REALLY going on with their market, as opposed to what they THINK is going on (or their own biases and preconceptions about their market).

Talking to actual customers is the best.