When I started  in business in the 90’s, I knew of only two sources of market research available to a budding entrepreneur with no funding:  reading out-of-date “market reports” for free in the library, and cold calling people from Yellow Pages and asking them questions.

The first, although interesting, didn’t give me a great deal of useful information.  The second was more valuable; it gave me direct experience of what my prospective clients were like, and I even won some business from doing it.  But it was very time-intensive, and only gave me a narrow view of my market.

Things are better these days.  A lot better.  There are dozens of free market research tools that give detailed, usable information.  You can find out the size of your target market, exactly what they want, and the level of competition with relative ease.

In this short series, I’m going to discuss a few of these tools.  You’ll notice that a lot of them are keyword tools.  I’m keen on these because as more and more people use search engines as their first port of call for information, keywords give you unparalleled insight into what your prospective clients are thinking.

Google market research tools

Google seems to be giving an increasing amount of access to its search data as time goes by. Whilst this is bad news of companies who charge for this sort of information, it’s great news for the rest of us.

A word of advice – don’t take numbers from a single Google tool (or any other data source for that matter) as definitive.  You should take information from several sources and triangulate to get a real feel for your subject.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

This has been my favourite tool for a while. It gives you information drawn from Google’s pay per click system, and tells you suggested keywords along with very handy statistics. The most relevant of which for our purposes are:

• Estimated Number of searches in a month (a recent addition, certainly not 100% accurate)-  tells you how popular the search is
• Estimated competition and estimated bid price - tells you how competitive a term is online, and how valuable it is to your competition

Not all of this information is shown by default; you need to click “choose columns to display” to get the option to show it.

Google suggest

Suggest started out as a Google Labs product, and has now been incorporated into Google’s main page, so you’ve probably seen it already.  It draws data from a number of sources, including what people are using Google’s new Chrome browser to search for.

Type in the start of a query, and Google will offer a suggestion on how to complete it.  It only shows the first 10 matches, but you can go into more detail by typing more words into the search box.

I strongly recommend making Suggest a regular part of your market research toolkit, as ’suggested’ (i.e. led by the search engines) search is going to play a big part in the online business landscape in the future.

Google Trends

http://trends.google.com

Google Trends gives you the relative search popularity of keywords you enter, plotted against time.  You can drill down to Geographic areas, and also see what major news stories related to the topic were released at a given date.

I find it most useful for deciding between two subjects that my prospective clients might be interested in.

Google Insight for Search

http://www.google.com/insights/search/

Google Trends on steroids.  It combines historial overview of trends with keyword suggestion capabilities, including information on related keywords, and tells you which keywords are rising in popularity at the moment.  You can also narrow results by subject category.

You need to log in to get the full functionality, but it’s well worth it.  The only problem I’ve found so far is that if you hit it with a lot of queries in a short space of time, it seems to think you’re an automated program and blocks you for a while.

Google Maps

http://maps.google.com

With fast access to all this global information, it’s easy to forget about the opportunities - and competition - on your doorstep.  Local search gets more popular every year, and using Google Maps gives you a good visual representation of who’s where in your area.

To use, just type in the location and keywords and it will plot a map for you.

Google Alerts

http://www.google.com/alerts

I have used Google Alerts ever since I got surprised by the news one of my company’s major clients had been acquired.  I heard it first from the CEO, a month after there was a general press release about it.  Not good.

It covers quite a few trade and financial journals, so even if your sector doesn’t make the “mainstream” press very often you can pick up some very interesting information.

For the company I mentioned earlier, I found out very quickly next time they made an acquisition, and won a very profitable piece of business as a result.

That’s it for starters. There are loads more tools you can use, from Google alone!  Let me know if I’ve missed one of your favourites in the comments

In the next article in the series, I’ll cover using social media to find out what really matters to your prospects now.