Market Research Methods For a Startup Business

Before you even jump into your startup you need to at least try a handful of market research methods for your startup. These can give you valuable insights into the current market place, who you will be competing with and the size of the market. market research methods this post will discuss are the low budget methods that any startup can use. If you have gained a lot of funding or have money for market research there are a lot of places you can find market research to buy and we will deal with these places in the future for now we will focus on the low cost methods.

Low cost market research methods

• Use Google and other search engines – Do a search on a search engine as if you are one of your own customers take a look at all of the top ten listings at least. Draw up a table to make notes on the strengths and weaknesses based on their websites. If you cannot find any businesses try another term. If there are no businesses then this may mean there is not much market for the business or it could be that the business does not need a web presence which is rare but does happen.
• Check traffic ranking – Take some of the websites you found in the previous method and check them on Alexa, Quantcast and compete. These are services that measure a sites traffic volumes most of the time these are estimates but it can give you a good idea of traffic volumes for your specific market. This can be a good indication of the potential within that market.
• Call as a potential customer – You can call other businesses in your market as a potential customer if it’s available and viable to your market. This can help you gain great insights into your competitors activities and how they treat there customers.
• Sign up for mailings – If any of the sites offer an email newsletter sign up you should sign up for updates and then you can see how they manage their electronic customer relationship management.
• Do online competitive research – There are SEO tools you can use to check the competitiveness of the search results page. By using these tools you can see how competitive the market is and how much work it will take to gain some market share.
• If your thinking of starting an offline business visit your potential competitors – You can get great insight into your competitors business by visiting them if they have a shop on the high street visit them and check out their products/services. If you are looking at opening an offline business in an particular area then look around that area to see how many competitors are in that area to get an idea of how competitive it would be to enter that market.
• Use a keyword tool – There are a lot of keyword tools online these can help your business in two ways they can give you an idea of search volumes and also the competitiveness of certain terms.
• Run an online survey – If you already have a list of potential customers or a communication channel open that you could use to reach your market then send a survey to get customer insights directly from the customer.

As you can see from this post there are numerous ways you can research a market for a very low cost so you cannot have any excuses for not carrying out market research. It may save you a lot or make you a lot of money in the future by just taking a look at the current business environment first.

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