3 Secret Tricks to Advanced Market Research For a Startup

Published in

ART + marketing

6 min readOct 10, 2018

Millions of entrepreneurs worldwide are struggling to find a niche for their startup. How do you validate a business idea?

Markets today are competitive as never before. You may think of a brilliant startup idea, but you’d want to check if it already exists.

Chances are it most likely does exist. But if it doesn’t there are some ways to verify your idea. The first is online market research, and the second is actually talking to people. In this article we’ll be discussing the former.

What’s the smartest way to conduct online market research?

Hi, my name is Marina Baslina, and today I’m going to share secret market research methods.

What’s Included in Market Research

Industry and market outlook. Market size, market trends, and market segments.
Target segment, customer buyer persona based on demographics and psychographics.
Competitor research. Competitor market share, pricing, and product marketing.

Secret 1. Researching industry and market data

In this step it’s all about Google search tricks. Usually, I use keywords such as, “X market size pdf”; “X market outlook pdf”; or “X market trends pdf”. As you can see below when you use “pdf” you get insightful reports from research companies that have already done all the work for you.

Google search feed results for search phrase with “pdf” word

Google Research Tips to Do Market Research like a Pro

Use quotes to search for an exact phrase. Example: “Augmented Reality Market Size 2019” pdf
Search research companies’ websites for keywords. Example: “Augmented Reality Market Size:STATISTA.com”
Google Trends in case you need to know what’s trending in searches now. This tool will show you what’s on the mind of consumers, which company is popular in searches, and where the market is going.
Search market size charts using Google images. It’s very effective when you can’t find market research reports in the search. Example:

Google Images search for charts and market data graphs

Secret 2. Researching market segments, customer buyer persona based on demographics and psychographics

In this step, we want to find information about our customers. The best way to do so is to search for survey results. Global research companies like Nielsen often publish survey data online. All you have to do is to find those reports.

Use special keywords like: “survey”, year “2018”, “pdf”, customer info “small business owners”. Example:

Google search result for surveys research

In this stage, you want to get information about segment size, client problems. For example, to find out what bothers small business owners we search for: “small business owner problems survey pdf”. If you want to get local result don’t forget to add the country “US”, or city “New York”.

Google search result for client problems research

How to Do Research for Customer Demographics

Customer demographics can be also obtained from survey results. Usually, at the end of each research document, there is information about respondents. Google Scholar is the best way to get information about your market demographics.

Google Scholar Customer Demographics Research

For example, we want to find out the age, income, education, and occupation of our consumers. Go to Google Scholar and search for research papers created by professional researchers.

Let’s say we want to know more about people who love food festivals:

Google Scholar Feed showing results for client demographics search

As you can see above, results #1–3 are very close to what we want to know about this market. This is actually the real work I’ve done for a client that wanted to know more about this market in Australia. Here you can take a look at the Australian food festivals consumer research report with all information sources.

Google Scholar is great when finding information about consumer demographics and psychographics.

Note that to open academic journal article you need Sci-Hub website: http://sci-hub.tw. You need to copy and paste DOI.

ResearchGate Customer Demographics Research

ResearchGate is a free research portal with lots of comprehensive reports. For example, I have found the article about food festival visitors behavior.

The process is the same. You can search for information like in Google using specific keywords.

Other Tools for Customer Demographics Research

Google. If you weren’t able to find information about your customer use Google trick with “pdf” or Google Images. You can also search for “X buyer persona pdf” and sometimes you get real information on your buyer persona.
Facebook Audience Insights is a great tool for US customer demographics research. You start with the information about consumer and proceed with the demographic charts. What’s great about this tool is that it shows pages your customer follows, job titles, education level. If you are using Facebook Ads you should try this tool.
Forums. You can get great information from niche forums. People usually describe their problems with a certain product and even provide business ideas you can copy.

For example, one client asked me to do research for his men’s underwear product. He needed information about key motivations for wearing undershirts and why do men don’t wear undershirts.

This forum styleforum.net helped me to find out lots of insightful things for this business. Take a look at page 15 in this UnderShirt Market Research.

Secret 3. Competitor Research

In this step, we need to find our competitors market share, pricing, and how they do marketing.

Google for Competitor Research

Again use Google for the third step of your research. It’s obvious that you will use market-related keywords. But if you can’t find you competitor try searching for Market Players research.

Keyword to use: market players, market share, revenue statistics, company x vs company x.

I had a client that needed information about Augmented Reality market and key players on the market. It turned out that are 2 major social media companies: Facebook and Alphabet (Google’s YouTube). Let’s dive deeper in this case.

How to Find Information about Competitor Revenues

If it’s a public company

Go to Yahoo Finance and search for companies’ symbol. In the case of Alphabet it’s “GOOG”. You can find public company stock name can in Wikipedia.

If it’s not a public company but big one

This one is obvious. Go to Google and search for “Company X revenues”, “Company X annual revenue”. Or search for “X market companies revenue streams”.

If it’s a medium or small sized business

Use Hoovers. This one is great when you know the real name of the company. At the very bottom of the company website page you can find information about the company legal name: XXX LLC , or XXX LTD. If it’s not possible then try who.is to find out which company owns the website. After that, you can proceed with Hoovers.

Competitor Market Share Research

With the market share, it’s difficult. If you’re lucky, or the market is in trend now you will find the information on Google. But if the market is small and fragmented it will be almost impossible. You can calculate market shares if you find top 100 companies on this market and its revenues.

Competitor Pricing Research

You can always find information about pricing on the companies website. But if it’s not available try using consumer websites such as https://www.toptenreviews.com/ as they include pricing for each product they compare. If you’re searching for software company pricing use https://www.capterra.com. Forums are also a solution.

Competitor Marketing Strategy Research

Search for company case studies and articles in media as sometimes founders share their marketing secrets.
Similarweb is great for searching for top online marketing channels that work for a particular company or app. Example: https://www.clickfunnels.com/ top online marketing channels: