Reputation Management | How to Get a Jump on Your Competition with Marketing Research

How to Get a Jump on Your Competition with Marketing Research

There are several steps that one must undergo to do proper marketing research no matter what the product or service is that you are offering. Some form of the following steps should be taken by all businesses no matter how small or large they are.

Actually the smaller the business is, the more important I think it is to do even more market research because of the amount of competition in most businesses. Market research is a great way to gain an advantage in all your business dealings and life.

“ Keyword Research:
There are many free tools available online that anyone can use to conduct keyword research. This is a very important step in any marketing campaign and the most common form of online market research.

Most of the tools available will let you input a keyword or list of keywords, and then give you information based on that list. Most tools provide you with alternate keywords, the amount of people advertising those keywords and the number of people in the last month that have searched for those keywords.

“ Price Research:
There are several ways to go about doing price research for Internet products or services. You need to see what other people in your field are charging for similar products, so you have an idea of what to charge for your product.

“ Competition Research:
The point before this deals with the pricing of other projects. This one, however, deals with the products themselves. There are several reasons to know what kinds of products your competition is selling. One reason is that you will know what kind of stuff is selling. Another, and maybe more important reason, is you will know how to outdo your competition.

“ Joint Venture Research:
This is maybe the most important step once you know what your product is going to be and what your price point is going to be. It is essential to get other people to join forces with you to cross market each other’s products.

This is good because let’s say you have 2000 prospective customers and your friend Bob has a list of 1500 prospective customers that are different than yours. So if you both work together, then you almost double your customer base. Now imagine working with 10, 15 or even 20 other people. How many more prospective customers would you reach then?

All these points are very important by themselves. If you used these all together, you would have a powerful advantage over your competition. In fact, even if you use one or two of these marketing research techniques, then you will blow your competition away.