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When starting an online business, it is essential to conduct market research prior to the website launch. The Web offers many opportunities for conducting inexpensive or free online market research, which many can do your his or herself. Online market research makes competitive analysis and marketing plan development a cost-effective reality for online business owners. Market research is important for several reasons:
1. To determine an actual need for the products, services, or information planned to be offered.
2. To determine whether the market is already saturated with too much competition.
3. To determine the strengths and weaknesses of competitors as compared to your online business.
4. To gain a better understanding of your target market, their needs, and how you can effectively market to them.
5. To discover potential problems or flaws with your website, products, or services of your online business prior to a public release.
Here are a selection of online market research tools and tactics:
1. Search Engines
Search engines (like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN’s Live) are free tools that can help a large amount with online market research efforts. Their first use in online market research is in helping to identify online competitors. Simply search for variations of your business, niche, industry, or names of products and services to see who is directly competing with your online business. You can also conduct searches to help with your marketing efforts, such as searching for incoming links to a competitor’s website, so you can target the same, or similar, sites in your link-building campaign.
2. Keyword Suggestion Tools
Keyword suggestion tools, such as those provided by Overture and WordTracker, are simple online market research tools one can use to determine demand for the niche, products, or services with an online audience, by evaluating a keyword phrase’s search frequency.
3. Online Market Research Reports
You can find a great deal of relevant market research already conducted for you in online market research reports. These range from free market research reports on your location, market demographics of your visitors, or your industry / niche (often from government or educational research projects), to paid market research reports from private companies and researchers (sometimes costing thousands of dollars per report). For basic demographic market research online, check your government’s housing authority or industry / labor websites, or their equivalents.
4. Survey Sites / Tools
Whether you use a free survey site or an integrated survey tool directly on your website, surveys are an important feedback-gathering tool in online market research. Surveys are an excellent way to discover your target market’s thoughts regarding your customer service, new products or services, site design changes, policy changes, and more. Surveys are also an effective means of gathering demographical information on your target market.
5. BETA Testing / Focus Groups
Focus groups are not just for offline market research. Before launching a website or online business (or even a specific product or service online) publicly, you can recruit beta testers to test products or site to report flaws or bugs, or you can hire or recruit a more general online focus group to provide feedback on anything from your Web design to site usability. Test and focus groups are a perfect example of how traditional market research methods can be tailored to an online market research model.
This post is an edited version originally supplied by Jenn Mattern, owner of JH Mattern Communications and First Rate Content.
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