How To Do Online Market Research?
The idea of expansion and growth make the entrepreneurs impulsive. Staying ahead of the curve becomes their unending thirst. Thus, they passionately work 24/7. But what if they don’t get it and success remains a dream only? The modern scenario of the commerce world has its answer underlying in market research. Old hands of the corporate world would be known to it. But now, it’s buzzing everywhere. Even, the starter-ups of today get their head around this research to know A to Z about the market and customers. They all jazz up with the present trend of online market research. Let I show you the shortcut to it.
Current Audience: As customers are at the center of the stage in business, so let we begin with how to identify your current audience.
1. Overviewing statistics: Entering to any business lane, the business man should have crystal clear image of his goals and the domain in which he is going to step. If he wants to strike at the solid idea, going through statistics can make the figures of growth apparent.
For example, if I want to commence data entry business, I have to make up my mind over the same. Then, explore the statistics of this field in my specific region to analyze for making it a cash cow or not. Take a look over the statistics, such as of http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes439021.htm of your website (USA) or http://mospi.nic.in/Mospi_New/site/inner.aspx?status=3&menu_id=53 (India), to analyze future prospects along with present structure.
2. Target online hubs of customers: The statistics shed light on the online portals where the current customers spend most of their time. What else than those of social media networks can be the hotspots to identify their preferences, demographic and psychographic data! These networks carry analytics and activity reports of customers. Facebook Page Insights, Twitter Analytics, Pinterest Business Analysis, You Tube Analysis, Google Analytics and many more of particular website can help you in comprehending existing customers.
It is to be added in the example of the second point “Target online Hubs of Customers” as “Have a look over the sample screenshot of one of the emerging market research companies to take an overview of the website’s activities, demographics and how many sessions are spent on it with data visualization.”
3. Customers’ feedback & evaluation: The next activity is to learn what your edges and potholes are while meeting customers’ requirements. An intelligent website-owner can easily go behind the scenes and track their requirements and frustration points. But being a regular viewer of them is compulsory. Feedback forms, testimonials and reviews unveil their true intentions.
Have a look over this testimonial. The satisfaction is vividly expressed in it.
4. Know your professional rivals: Shortlisting business rivals can be an effective tool to get insight of their working style, customer handling, relationship building and finely tuned with the updates. As you enter the keyword of your product/ service in the search bar of the Google or Bing or Yahoo, numerous websites will come to your view. Your ranking will help you to judge where you stand amid your rivals. The websites ranking ahead you drop the clue of your business rivals.
Target Audience:
- Check out users’ stats: However, knowing customers is a herculean act but the correct usage of online statistics providers, like Twitter Usage, Instagram Press and YouTube Statistics, can bring you in big picture of customers’ network. All these statistics drive you straight to conclusion about the places where the customers stay tuned to, such as Forums, blogs, LinkedIn, Twitter and so on. Thereby, you can come out swinging with the knowledge of customers’ behaviour, their likes and dislikes through graphical presentation of their spent sessions on the website.
2) Check out your inbox: It’s must to socialize through social media or website to outreach local as well as global communities. Catching the glances of the either platform’s inbox carries mark-sheet of your performance. Good reviews mark good effort but negative reviews pose challenges to faceoff. Requirements in reviews can be your generated lead. So, checking the inbox is must.
3) Check out send folder: Likewise your smartphone’s sent folder, your gmail account surely carries treasure-trove of vital information about customers’ request or queries. The questions-and-answers of the sale executive with the customer disclose information that can be comprehended as ‘demand’.
4) Questioning round: Online surveys and questioning help you go extra mile in judging customers’ needs, wants, buyers’ behavior, demographic insights and messages. Online survey, Facebook questions and Twittersphere are some of the excellent examples of representing customers’ queries.
5) Go through conversations: Hashtag and keyword search cultivate outstanding outcomes of online market research. Hashtags add label to your product or service. Using these, the social platforms, such as Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+, enable the searchers to fetch the relevant product or service. And keywords help in identifying the same in the search engine’s results. The latter is more sophisticated in usage and fetch billion of customers in minutes.
6) Make your online community: The below online platforms let you connect, share and communicate information to diverse end-users directly.
· Twitter: It’s a micro-blogging site.
· LinkedIn Group: It’s the network of professionals
· Facebook Group: It accesses the vast community.
· Pinterest Group: It’s the board that harbors various categories defining various interests of potential customers. Like:
· YouTube Category: It is a platform where interest and preferences of the customers can be tapped in exact numbers.
· Google+ Hangout: It lets the peer groups of college, friends and public communities communicate and share their preferences.
· Reddit: Up pivot or down pivot on this website represents what’s the most popular and buzzing product or service of the vast community.
· Stumble Upon: From here, you can switch directly to the videos, posts, webpages and images trimmed to their personalized interest. It is the best tool to segregate audience according to their taste.
· Forum Postings: Although, forum postings have been outdated but it used to be an effective communicator of target audience’ choice.
7) Plug in discussions: Discussions open new dimensions. Hence, new trends take birth. Many of the foretold online platforms fuel buzzing which indicates customers’ behavior which is exponential in online research.
· Twitter trend as below:
· Trending on facebook
· Youtube trends
· Pinterest Pins
· Instagram Hashtags
