In the past few months, I’ve talked to numerous prospects and have a good sense of the most important action they could take to improve their online marketing efforts.
The sauce, dear readers, is marketing research.
Too often business owners have not done the market research. Too often someone starts a business with the idea that “I love to make hats, so I’ll start a hat business.” However, they do not think, “I’ll start
a hat business because I’ve received a lot of requests to make hats.”
See the difference?
Is your business idea a good one?
The answer lies in the market research. Do people want what you want to offer?
If you want to research market demand on a product or business idea, these free tools will help
you assess whether there’s demand for what you want to sell. However, they will not necessarily
let you know if your current product will make money.
These tools will let you see current trends so you can develop new products around what people want now.
How to Conduct Basic Market Research
The sites below offer a window into the tastes and desires of online buyers. Buyers are out there right now looking for certain products and solutions. You can tap into these desires.
Ebay set up an area with their most popular searches. As of today, the top three are:
- iphone
- ipod
- wii
The largest three ebay stores currently are:
- am-autoparts
- Outpost Media Deals
- Car Parts Wholesale
Let’s take a look at one more resource, and then I’ll let you know where to go from there.
This generous feature from Yahoo allows you to see the top searches from the past day.
The top three for today are:
- Jessica Alba
- Alice Braga
- WWE
If we look down the list a bit, we can see that Hi-5 is at position 10 for today. I’ll come back to that in a
moment.
How to Turn Your Research into a Product or Service
When we researched Ebay Pulse, we discovered that iphone and ipod were at the top. What kind of business can be created around that?
Let’s brainstorm.
What common issues do ipod users have?
One issue I’ve discovered is that the earphones hurt after a long day. If you’re in a place where you want to use earphones — an airplane or cubicle — this is an annoying problem to have.
Perhaps your business could offer a way to provide a more comfortable solution.
Now, let’s look at the largest ebay stores for inspiration. I’m surprised that auto parts do this well on ebay. This is why we research! Because we’ll be surprised that what we think is popular might not be.
If you conduct further research, you might find a demand for a car part that these bigger stores don’t offer. Perhaps you’ll find a number of people looking for a vintage car part, and you know how to provide it. Voila! You have a business idea.
At Yahoo Buzz, I was particularly interested to see that Hi5, a social networking site, was a top search term. Not Facebook? Not LinkedIn?
If you were to become a Hi5 expert, you could offer products and services on how to use Hi5 to promote a business and get clients.
The ideas are endless when you brainstorm.
Essentially, you want to tap into what people want and then figure out a way to satisfy that desire (and make money in the process).
