Information can stimulate the imagination, suggest fresh strategies, or help you recognize great business opportunities. Always keep one ear open for interesting, surprising, or inspiring facts. Subscribe to a diverse range of publications, read interesting blogs, and make a point of talking to people of all sorts, both in your industry and beyond it, to keep you in the flow of new ideas and facts. Also, ask other people for their ideas.

Consumers are all around you, and they’re shopping for, buying, and using products. Observing consumers, and finding something new and of value from doing so, isn’t hard. And even business-to-business marketers (who sell to other businesses rather than end-consumers) can find plenty of evidence about their customers at a glance. For instance, the number and direction of a company’s trucks on various roads can tell you where its business is heaviest and lightest.

Many countries gather and post extensive data on individuals, households, and businesses, broken down into a variety of categories. In the United States, you can find out how many people earn above a certain amount of money a year and live in a specific city or state – useful if you’re trying to figure out how big the regional market may be for a luxury product. Similarly, you can find out how many businesses operate in your industry and what their sales are in a specific city or state – useful if you’re trying to decide whether that city has a market big enough to warrant you moving into it.

Set up a trend report, a document that gives you a quick indication of a change in buying patterns, a new competitive move or threat, and any other changes that your marketing may need to respond to.

Your company’s records of past customers are an absolute gold mine of information that can be easily overlooked. Use these records to figure out what types of customers defect, when, and why. If you can’t pinpoint why a customer abandoned you (from a complaint or a note from the salesperson, for example), try to contact the lost customer and ask him directly.

In consumer marketing, it’s best if customers think you’re cool and your competitors aren’t. Because kids lead the trends in modern society, why not ask them what those trends are? Ask them simple questions like, “What will the next big thing be in [name your product or service here]?” Or try asking kids this great question: “What’s cool and what’s not cool this year?” Why?

Whether you’re looking at a letter, catalog, Web page, tear sheet, press release, or ad, you can improve the piece’s effectiveness by asking for reviews from a few customers, distributors, or others with knowledge of your business.

Most marketers fail to mine their own databases for all the useful information those databases may contain. Study your customers with the goal of identifying three common traits that make them different or special. This goal helps you focus on what your ideal customer looks like so you can look for more of them.

Customer satisfaction changes with each new interaction between customer and product. If your product makes customers happy, they come back. If not, adios. Recruiting new customers costs anywhere from 4 to 20 times as much as retaining old ones (depending on your industry), so you can’t afford to lose customers — which means you can’t afford to dissatisfy them.

If you market to businesses, you probably have e-mail addresses for many of your customers. Try e-mailing 20 or more of them for a quick opinion on a question. The result? Instant survey! If a clear majority of respondents say they prefer using a corporate credit card to being invoiced because the card is more convenient, well, you’ve just gotten a useful research result that may help you revise your marketing approach.