What Are The Benefits of Marketing Research?
We will show you how to find the following marketing research information for free:
- What is being said about yours and other's company
- Where your competition is advertising online
- What websites are popular related to your product, but not competing with you
- What companies are linking to your website, or your competition
If the only advertisements people see are your competition, they will naturally choose your competition. How would you like your ad to show up everywhere your competition advertises? Want to know if someone said something bad about you or your competition? It would give you the chance to play hero and remedy the situation. Would you like your advertisements to be shown everytime someone does a related search to your products?
How to Find out What People Say
Newsgroups are one of the older functions of the internet, although not everyone uses them. Newsgroups are very popular and quite a bit of traffic can be generated by using them properly. Basically a newsgroup is an area where anyone can post a message about anything. http://groups.google.com keeps an archive of millions of messages, searchable. Visit it now and type in your name, or your company's name. This is an excellent tool!
Once you find out what people are saying you can either subscribe to a news provider and post a reply, a defense, or offer a solution. Usually you want to respond politely and professionally to any claims, protecting the reputation of your business. You could also be the hero on a negative post towards competition, and offer a solution where your competition is unaware there is a problem. For a tutorial about newsgroup marketing please visit our Niche Marketing tutorial.
Where is Your Competition Advertising
Once again we will use the power of google to research our competition. To research where your comptetion has advertisements on the Internet ( in order to later get your advertisements in the same spots ), visit google.com. Type in your competitors website and click the link that says: "contain the term". A listing of all of the websites that have your competitors website will appear. Note, you must type exactly what you are searching for using this method.
Google's "contain the term" tool for digitalcrunch.com has the following results. Feel free to look as an example.
Who is Linking to Me or My Competition?
Look at the picture above, the technique is exactly the same, except you will click the "linking to" tool. Easy!
Once you find who is linking to your competition, you can probably get a link there too. Visit their site and see what their linking requirements are. Submit your link and follow up!
You should have exposure everywhere that your competition has exposure, and this is the kind of marketing research that will direct your advertising dollars appropriately.
How Do I Find Popular Websites Where I can Advertise?
This one is simple too. If you are selling "angels", look for sites that talk about angels, or rank well for search results on angels, but that are not competing with you. Approach them with letters asking for a link trade. You'd be suprised at how often and easy it is. You'll have to be persistent though, as not everyone will even read your emails.
Read our Business Letter Examples tutorial for more advice on trading links, and example letters you can use.