Web Development Blog

The Internet should be a market researchers dream. Millions and millions of people all communicating with each other willingly, on the planet's largest many-to-many communication medium.

It's not always easy though, to get the right information that you need to do your market research successfully. One of the crucial parts to successful market research is making sure you ask the right questions to the right people. If you're selling an online webmaster tool - then you'll need to target webmasters only. Other problems include how to separate the wheat from the chaff - with so much information out there, you'll have to find what's relevant to your product and what's not.

We're going to look for some of the practical research tools that we've come across here, that you might use to determine whether there's a niche on the web for your product to compete in. We'll give examples of using both primary and secondary research methods.

Government Publications: Government agencies are invariably responsible for measuring and monitoring industries in order to determine their effect on the economy. This data is compiled by spending your tax dollars. So this information is usually made available to anyone that wishes to view it. Contact your local agency for information on marketing reports etc...

Competitor's Sites: One of the best forms of market research is monitoring your competition. How are other people in your industry selling and marketing their product ? Where do their ads appear ? Are they getting mentioned on blogs and in the press ?

What are their users saying about them ? If you have no competition then that's wonderful right ? Well, you might want to think again. No competition might mean that there's no real market for the product that you're offering ...

Google Trends: Google trends is a great tool to examine the relative popularity of searches on Google. It can break down this data by region, city and month. You can also compare the relative popularity of two terms together. Use Google Trends to determine whether people are searching for products or terms that you'll want to compete with.

Google Adwords: While Google Trends will help you find what people are searching for, Google Adwords is great to find what people are purchasing. Generally a healthy Adwords market for your niche is a good thing, as there's probably a fair amount of customers clicking through those ads to make purchases. Even if you don't go on to use Adwords as a marketing tool, it's a great tool to check the relative online strength of the market.

Ebay.com: Ebay is certainly on of the Internet's largest marketplaces. Many types of products and services are already being sold in an Ebay auction. Try Ebay to see whether there's something on there already and what price point it's being sold for.

Hitwise.com Hitwise is a data collection agency stores data as users surf the web. If you've every downloaded a smiley-face toolbar or any other type of web browser tool. It's possible that you agreed to let an agency such as Hitwise monitor and store your browsing habits.

The good news for marketers is that this data is then distilled into market research and hitwise can monitor how many people visit certain sites and which sites they visit that site from. This can be a great tool to determine just where your competitor is getting their visitors from. The downside is that it can be expensive, with reports often costing thousands of dollars.

Market Research Company: Market research companies like Forrester Research are in the business of compiling market research reports on various industries so they can sell that info on to other businesses and researchers. This data is usually timely and can be extremely useful. You may however have to pay a few hundred dollars or more to get access to the online reports.

Online Surveys: Carrying out your own direct market research is important. Online questionnaires are a good start, often asking questions in forums or mailing lists can be useful. Don't forget social networks such as Facebook or MySpace where networks of people who share interests congregate in groups.

Affiliate Networks: Often a company will focus on producing a product to the very best of it's ability and will either outsource a portion of, or all of their marketing to professional online marketers called affiliates. These affiliate networks will pick and choose which companies products they'll choose to sell based on whether the product itself sells in the marketplace and on the commission that the company is willing to share with the marketers. Make sure to check affiliate networks such as Commission Junction to find what kind of terms companies in your industry are offering to marketers, and whether or not they are achieving success.

These are just a few of the many online resources that you might like to check out before committing time and resources by green-lighting a project. Don't forget to check out Part 2 of this article that deals with how to gauge market reaction to your product after launch.

What works best for you in the marketplace when it comes to conducting marketing research for a new product or service ? We'd love to hear your comments ...