1.  Go to one of the on-line services and search for articles on
your competitors, your industry and your market.  There is a great deal of
information out there, just waiting for you to ask for it. For example, one
bank learned how a new service had been made successful by a bank in a distant
state, while most bankers were still thinking about it. Some services will even
do all the search work for you, delivering a fresh, customized bank news report
every morning to your desk for less than $15.00 per month.
 
2.  Get out and visit your competitors.  Send someone to pose as
an interested prospect, ask questions, pick up literature, even put their name
on mailing lists.  Go into branch locations, check out the point-of-sale
materials, talk with a couple of customer service representatives about the
bank's products.  Maybe even request some information  be sent to a post office
box and see what comes. This research technique is know as
"The Mystery Shopper" and has been done by many banks.
 
3.  Review the information you have in your computer files on
your previous or current customers.  There's some important information in your
files which can be used with other data bases to give you excellent pictures of
your marketplace. You can also learn what you should be saying in your sales
messages and where you should be saying it. Zip codes can be tied back to
census data and generate excellent demographic links to new customers.
 
4.  Do a telephone poll of some customers and prospects.
 See what they have to say about your bank and your competitors. Be careful
about who makes these calls.  If one of your staff does the phone calling,
there might be too much bias or prejudice in recording results of the call.
(Might be wiser to have a professional telemarketer make the calls.)
 
One bank, for example,  dropped 15,000 pieces of direct mail promoting a new
service. The response was meager. Follow-up telephone research verified however
that there  wasn't much interest or need for this new service. (The bank should
have done the research before moving ahead with the mailing, but it did learn
why the mailing didn't work. Without the telephoning they would still be
guessing.)
 
5.  Hire an experienced consultant to " ride the rails " with
your best and worst officers on some of their prospect calls.   Most people
won't tell the boss what they will tell a good consultant.  This exercise can
give you excellent insights into what your marketplace is all about and why
your officer call program is or isn't working.
 
6.  Review US Government data bases and talk with local
offices.  Don't throw up your hands when you first start. There's some good
information here if you know where to look. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau
can do a population  profile for every county in your market area. The U.S.
Commerce Department can give business financial data on your market, county by
county.
 
7.  Talk with publishers and editors of newspapers, magazines
and broadcast stations you will be advertising with during the year.  There's a
great deal of information easily retrievable. There are industry studies,
surveys and just plain opinion to be had for the asking.
 
For example one bank talked with local media and found out that their ad budget
was meager when compared to their competitors. This helped explain why few
people seemed to recall their ad messages.