Published as a part of a three article series in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo

Last week we looked at six ways you could use the internet to help you conduct efficient, cost effective market research. This week we offer another six suggestions that can help you get your fledgling business off the ground.

1. Create online polls and surveys: survey based market research can reveal all sorts of information about your potential customers. But putting together and undertaking an effective survey used to be a costly, time consuming and labour intensive process. Now, thanks to the popularity of the internet and sites like Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) and PollDaddy (www.polldaddy.com) creating interactive online polls and surveys to canvas customer opinion has never been easier. Best of all, these services will collate and present all the results without you having to lift a finger.

2. Check out your competitors’ websites: competitor research is crucial for any new business – and what better place to start than your competitors’ websites. You’ll find specific information about the company, the services or products they provide, what they charge, and will be able to infer things like the market their targeting. What are they doing well (emulate them), what are they doing badly (learn from them), and what aren’t they doing at all (and does that present an opportunity for you)?

3. Search peer review sites: peer review sites can be generic, like Louder Voice (www.loudervoice.com) and Epinions (www.epinions.com), or industry specific like the travel review sites TripAdvisor (www.tripadvisor.com) and Boo.com (www.boo.com). Searching for specific keywords related to your business on both generic and industry specific review sites can tell you what people like and what they dislike about the services your competitors are offering, and your industry in general.

4. Harness the social web: social networking sites like MySpace (www.myspace.com), FaceBook (www.facebook.com), Bebo (www.bebo.com), and others are all the rage at the moment. Groups of like minded people are congregating in these digital social havens to interact, exchange ideas and to discuss anything and everything. If your customers are among them, these can be great places to engage, join groups, ask questions and share information about you and your business.

5. Feed me: RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a very easy and convenient way to keep up-to-date with the latest information online. Instead of spending time surfing a multitude of websites to see what, if anything, has been updated, your reader will pull all of the updates into one convenient location. All you need is a piece of software called an RSS Reader (Google offer a very capable, free online reader at http://reader.google.com), then simply add feeds from your favourite websites. To see what’s new all you need to do is fire up your feed reader and scan the headlines, then click through to the articles that interest you.

6. Look, listen, learn, engage: finally, the most important thing is to recognise that the web is an interactive and constantly evolving medium. Spend a bit of time “lurking” on relevant sites to get a feel for them. Listen to what people are saying and learn as much as you can from it. Once you’re comfortable though, you’ll get much more out of your online research if you choose to engage with and contribute to the online community your new business wants to reach. Just like in the real world the more you put in, the more you get out!

Published as a part of a three article series in the Career Moves section of the Evening Echo

The internet is a superb market research tool for your new or growing businesses. It can provide all sorts of useful insight into your industry, your competitors and, most importantly of all, your customers. In this article and the next in our series we take a look at twelve ways that the internet can make gathering marketing intelligence more productive and less costly for your fledgling business.

1. Read industry association websites: A quick search for industry related websites in your favourite search engine will unearth all sorts of valuable information: up-to-date news, white-papers, research and best practice guidelines, and more to inform the strategic direction you take with your new business. Decide to join, and you’ll probably get access to even more online resources, training and support….

2. Subscribe to analyst newsletters and report updates: one of the main sources of information for market research is reports from analyst firms like Forrester Research, Gartner Group and others. Stay ahead of the game by subscribing for e-mail updates on new analyst reports for your industry. You’ll get up-to-the minute summaries of the latest research direct to your inbox, and can invest in a full report or two if you feel it will help your business.

3. Use news aggregators to keep up-to-date: know what’s going on in your industry by searching for relevant keywords on news aggregation sites like Google News (news.google.com) and Yahoo! News (news.yahoo.com), both of which offer convenient, easily accessible window to global and local news stories, press releases and other material. You’ll have access to a much wider range of material that’s infinitely more useful than scanning through hundreds of print publications.

4. Read blogs: blogs (short for web-logs) are personal publishing platforms that allow people to post their thoughts on anything and everything to the web. A lot of them, naturally, won’t be relevant to your business, but dismissing blogs could be a serious mistake. The most popular bloggers on a particular subject can command huge audiences, and have massive influence on opinion in online communities. Reading these blogs can offer you valuable insight into what these key influencers in your field think. Remember, blogs are a two-way medium – so check out the comments to see what readers think, and perhaps even offer an opinion or two of your own.

5. Check out online forums: online forums can be great places to glean valuable information and advice for your business, and to identify the online influencers in your space. It doesn’t matter what business you’re in – a quick search is sure to unearth relevant interactive forums full of people passionate about your particular subject. Many of them are only too happy to share their experience, expertise and insight with newcomers. Just remember it’s a two-way-street, so be sure to engage in the conversation and help others out whenever you can.

6. Keep your finger on the online pulse with media submission sites: find out what’s flavour-of-the-moment with online consumers by checking out the top stories on online media submission sites like Digg.com (www.digg.com), StumbleUpon (www.stumbleupon.com) and others. These sites allow people to recommend, vote on and discuss news articles, blog posts and web pages they’ve seen online. As well as more general sites, be sure to check out industry specific media submission sites (Sphinn.com, for example, is an online media submission site for search and internet marketers). More of these are emerging all of the time, and they can give you a very industry-centric indication of what’s hot and what’s not online.

When you’re starting a new business one of the key things you need to do is market research. Who are your potential customers, and what are their wants and needs? What sort of demand is there for your products or services? Who are your main competitors, what are they offering, and how can you differentiate your business from theirs?

So many questions… when all you really want are answers. You obviously need to know all of these things and more to help you define a viable business plan and create an effective marketing strategy for your new business. But where do you start? Things like surveys and focus groups are often prohibitively expensive, and more often than not out of the financial reach of new businesses. You could make informed guesses, of course, but you’re really looking for something a bit more tangible.

Enter the Internet – that huge and ever growing ethereal melting pot of consumers and business. According to the latest figures there are some 1.3 billion people online, and they span the demographic gamut. There’s a pretty good chance that a healthy portion of your target market, and most of your competition is already online.

So what, you might think. Well, on today’s interactive web people are doing much more than simply looking for and absorbing information; they’re engaging in a two way discourse with their peers, a constantly evolving discussion about anything and everything that interests them – from how to grow runner beans to the relative merits of the Lisbon Treaty to what brand of hair-colouring they prefer. The web offers you a window into their world… a window of opportunity that could give your fledgling business that elusive competitive edge.

Web 2.0 maven Vanessa Fox, one of the guest speakers on social media at this year’s Search Marketing World conference in Dublin, believes that access to social media is levelling the playing field when it comes to market research. “Particularly for small businesses, who perhaps before didn’t have access to things like market research, focus groups and all those things that cost a lot of money, I think it’s very easy now for them to tap into the [online] conversation and see what’s going on,” she said.

Vanessa points out that there are all sorts of conversations going on online – not just about your business, but about key competitors, and about your industry in general – from which small businesses can glean real insight. “Even just the ability to hear what’s going on and take feedback from that I think is really valuable,” she said.

From conducting a simple keyword search to see who your main competitors are; to browsing through online groups, forums and blogs to identify the key influencers in your space; to setting up automated alerts and feeds that flag the conversations you want to track, and much more besides… there are a raft of tools out there to help you find out more about your customers, your competition, your industry and ultimately your business.

In the next article we’ll take a closer look at a few of them.

Image Credit: Explain market research by mafleen on Flickr under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license