Mozenda Blog

While there isn’t currently a great free alternative to paying for high-quality market research, there are several things you can do.

1. Find Your Customers

One place to find where your potential customers is Google Insights.  To illustrate how Google Insights can be used, let’s say that we work for a toy company is looking to launch a new toy robot and we want to know which geographical area will yield the best results for our advertising dollars.  We can perform this search worldwide (here) or I can restrict it to just the United States (here).  By performing these searches we can see that the U.S., the Philippines, and Singapore are the three countries searching the most for the term “toy robot” and that California, New York, and Oregon are the three states searching most for our product over the past four years.  From here, we can begin to do even more interesting research.  For example, by restricting U.S. results to the last 12 months (here), we can see that the top three results have changed to New York, California, and Washington (curiously Oregon, who was number three when looking at the past 4 years, has dropped out of the top 10).  Even more important, by looking at the geographical “heat map” that Google provides, we can see that there are a number of people searching for my product in the areas Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts.  This knowledge helps us find a more targeted, higher yield area in which to spend our advertising budget.

2. Find The Best Time To Sell Or Launch A Product

Because many products are seasonal or cyclical, determining the best time to launch a new product or ramp up production on an existing product can be a bit tricky.  Lucky for us, Google Insights can also be used to determine sales cycles.  Continuing with our previous example of selling a toy robot, let’s see what additional sales cycle information we can gleam.  In Google Insights, instead of using the comparing the results by” Search terms”, we will use the “Time ranges”.  This will allow us to overlay each year on top of the rest giving us the following graph:

The graph data tells us something that’s probably not much of a surprise: toy robots are a big Christmas seller.  Seeing that the Christmas increase begins in late October, we can plan production goals, staffing needs, and advertising budgets to meet the demand.  Although these results weren’t a big shocker, you do sometimes discover less obvious trends using Google Inisghts.  For example, the graph below is a look at searches for “flowers”.

While the Valentine’s Day spike is one I anticipated, I was surprised to see that Mother’s Day typically drives 50% more search traffic.  There is also a consistent¬—though significantly smaller—spike in traffic leading up to Christmas.  Businesses are better able to predict sales, inventory needs, and staffing requirements when they know when sales peaks are likely to occur throughout the year.

3. Research your competitors

Thanks to the pervasiveness  of the Internet within the business landscape, you can now get a far better understanding of who your competitors are than ever before.  Besides online Yellow Pages type sites, directories are good place to look.  While there are tens of thousands of directories scattered across the Internet, two of the largest and most respected directories are Yahoo (dir.yahoo.com) and DMOZ (dmoz.org).  Both directories have websites arranged into categories that are easily browsed through or searched.  Another resource within the tech sector is CrunchBase (crunchbase.com).  CrunchBase is a site that encourages technology companies and companies that provide services to technology companies to list themselves and their competitors on the site.  This means that, if you can find one company on CrunchBase that offers something similar to what you’re offering, there are likely to be several other competitors listed in the found profile.  There are also plenty of other industry-specific directories that can be found by searching online.
The next step in researching your competitors, once you’ve found them, is to research what they are doing online.  Alexa (alexa.com) provides a traffic ranking tool that is good for getting a perspective of where you fit in with competition.  Alexa doesn’t provide specific traffic numbers, but it does list websites in order of popularity (the most popular site’s having the lowest rankings).  By comparing your website to those of your competitors, you can get a feel for where your competitors fit in relation to each other, and in relation to your own site.  Along with Alexa, there are websites like Compete (compete.com) and Quantcast (quantcast.com).  Both sites provide free estimates of website traffic, but usually only have figures for larger, more established sites.  Besides traffic figures, Quantcast also estimates
Another tool for keeping an eye on what your competitors are doing is SpyFu (spyfu.com).  SpyFu allows you to search for keywords  or for specific websites and returns information about Pay-Per-Click advertising spending.  A search for a keyword will return estimated statistics on cost per click, number of advertisers, and clicks per day as well as giving a list of websites advertising under that keyword.  A search for a specific website returns estimated daily ad budgets, average ad positions, estimated clicks and cost per day, lists of organic and paid keywords, and lists of top organic and paid search competitors.  While SpyFu’s results are not always terribly accurate, they do provide insight into who your competitors are and how they are advertising.  SpyFu offers paid subscriptions so that you can track specific keywords or websites, if you find the service helpful.

4. Find Comparative Pricing Information

How your product or service is priced can make a big difference in your ability to sell.  One example, from a 2003 Wharton article involves Ford’s pricing strategy during the 90s.  In the early and mid 90s, Ford’s pricing strategy was to sell entry level cars at a very low profit margin in order to entice first-time buyers and create brand loyalty.  The thought was that the same buyers who purchased entry level cars would later stick with Ford and later buy more expensive, high-profit autos.  When Ford saw that their pricing strategy wasn’t working, they decided to shake things up.  They made significant price increases to their entry level cars and slight price decreases to their higher margin vehicles.  As a result, Ford sold over 400,000 fewer low-margin autos and gave up 2% of their market share, but sold 600,000 more high-margin cars and boosted profits to $7.2 billion in 1999.  Ford, by increasing profits on entry-level cars and increasing demand (by lowering prices) on high-margin cars, was able to drastically improve their profits.  The same Wharton article reports that a 1% increase in volume can result in a 3.3% increase in profits and a 1% increase in price can improve profitability by 11%.  So, knowing your margins and your competitor’s pricing is crucial for retailers.
One way e-retailers can keep an eye on competitor’s pricing is to use Mozenda’s software to regularly extract that information.  Mozenda is a data extraction software that lets users determine what specific information to gather from a web page.  The software can handle logins, navigating through multiple pages, and AJAX and JavaScript heavy sites.  All the information gathered is available online and can be exported in any number of formats to be used offline.  Mozenda is free to try which gives you a chance keep tabs on your competition without costing you anything.

5. Find what your customers think

Learning what your customers think of your product or service can have a significant impact on the success of your company.  An awareness of your customers’ opinions can help alert you to desired features, design flaws, manufacturing defects, and product successes.  Getting this kind of information can be done in a number of different ways, but one of the easiest ways to keep tabs on your customers’ opinions is by monitoring the conversations they’re having online in blogs and forums.  Most blogs and many forums have RSS feeds that provide alerts when new posts are made.  For example, Topix.com has an RSS feed subscription button at the bottom of each of its forum topics.  You can see a complete list of Topix’s forums here.  There are also several other industry and product specific forums scattered throughout the Internet that can be subscribed to, or can be monitored using the web data software discussed in the paragraph above.  Once you’ve got the data, you can either read the data, which can be time consuming or use a text analysis tool like those found here.  Text analytics tools can help find trends among the posts, which can help you discover how your customer’s are feeling, what problems they’re experience with your product, how your customer service department is performing, and more.