It’s not easy…..But it’s definitely worth the effort…..

Online Market Research has earned the repute of being one of the best and convenient methods of collecting information about customers. But if gone wrong in the slightest of measure, can result in a complete disaster.

Some online tools are available right away – questionnaires, feedback forms, web searches, web analytics and what not. All of these help you to analyse the latest trends and happenings and help you understand your customer, industry and competitors as well.

Following listed are a few tools to carry out successful market research:

1.  Keyword Search: Just type in your brand name on Google or Bing …and Bazingaaaa……!!! You’ll know all that people out there think about you. You’ll get to know how many competitors you have, how famous you are. As the editor-in-chief of a search engine guide mentioned, keyword searches can help you recognise niches and an insight on how many competitive sites use the same phrase for search. It can also help you search competitor offerings and online marketing strategy.

2. Blogs: These are more opinionated in nature and thus shall open up both the goods and the bads about your company/product. Careful look into blogs of influencers can help know potential improvements and give a specific set of people whom you can impress so as to build positive word-of -mouth.

3. Surveys and Feedback: I personally find Survey Monkey as the best and the easiest way to gauge customer preference, opinions, likes, dislikes etc.  Its a useful tool, like many others out there, where you can design your own surveys and questionnaires and thus collect and analyse data.

Designing of questionnaires requires great skill, as opposed to what a number of organisations might be trapped into thinking. A short survey is preferred, limited upto 25-30 questions. Avoidance of open ended questions and being persistent without the introduction of any bias from the surveyor’s part is important. The first few question should be demography related to keep the person on the other side at ease. Enticing the people towards a reward in return to answering a survey can be helpful at times too.

There are various research tools and techniques that are used so as to elicit information. Audience research is one such technique which is aimed at discovering who is listening to you. The others are product research, brand analysis, psychological profiling, scanner research, database research and post-sale or customer satisfaction research.

Defining an objective, designing an appropriate questionnaire to the correct target of customers and collecting the data obtained, analyzing it and making inferences – can be summarized as the broad steps of carrying out online market market research. So what are you waiting for……..