Online Product Research Tactics

Imagine that you are interested in purchasing a new car, how would you go about buying it? Let me fathom a guess, you would probably ask your relatives and friends for advice on certain car brands, look through automotive magazines and websites, make a trip down to the car dealerships and ask questions. A car is a huge investment/liability and it makes simple sense to do our product research in advance before a purchase.

Let’s switch this around and look at it from the business standpoint. You need information in order to introduce products and services that create value in the mind of the consumer. And product research can be used to estimate customer needs and wants in the hope to develop products that will be well accepted in the market. Marketing research is a whole specialized subject altogether and it can be a whole degree on its own. Hence I will merely be summarizing it here. There are basically 2 forms of market research design: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative methods are mainly exploratory in nature, meaning that you conduct focus groups or in-depth interviews with your target group to understand them better. The questions you would ask are usually more open ended as you do not want to restrict the flow of thoughts of the people you are asking the questions. Do take special note that due to the small sample size of these methods, their conclusions are not statistically sound and you cannot depend on them to make decisions.

Fueled with the findings from qualitative research methods, you can then go on to formulate quantitative research in the form of surveys or observational studies. Using a representative sample size would then be able to assist you in drawing out answers to questions that you need answered.

You can read up more details on marketing research at QuickMBA.com

For online product research, here are some quick and dirty methods that you can adopt.

1. Google Trends

You can perform searches on related products and names on Google Trends to estimate the level of searches done across various countries and cities. Definitely serves as a good estimate whether there is demand for your product and helps define your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.

2. iTarget.info

Great for performing checks on AdWords competitors (if there are AdWords Campaigns, there is probably a market) and even AdSense publishers who have related websites to yours.

3. Google Alerts

I’ve been using google alerts to keep myself informed on the latest happenings for keywords related to products I sell. Does keep a good tab check on competitors too. Famed internet marketer Willie Crawford just recently posted a great informative article titled “How To Guarantee Your Product’s Success Before You Even Start!” on how he uses Google Alerts for online product research. So instead of reinventing the wheel, here is a short extract of what he said.

How To Guarantee Your Product’s Success Before Your Even Start!
Copyright 2007 by Willie CrawfordToday, I’d like to teach you an easy method of researching a product or project idea BEFORE you invest a lot of time and other resources in it.

Over the past 11 years I’ve been shown over 100 products that “seemed like a great idea,” but when they were offered to the market, the customers weren’t interested. In a few cases the “marketing” was just bad, but in more cases, the product was simply something that the market didn’t want.

There are, of course, more research tools available than you could ever learn to use. So, today, I’m actually going to focus your attention on just two… and they’ll both be free.

First, I’d like to introduce you to Google Alerts! You’ll find this handy, free service offered by Google.com at: http://www.google.com/alerts

Note that Google does own the trademarks to all of the terms mentioned in this article that uses their name
Google Alerts allow you to subscribe to free notifications of when Google discovers new occurrences of a target phrase anywhere on the Internet. You can specify what types of databases Google provides you with updates from. As you’ll see when visiting the site, it’s fairly self-explanatory.

I have dozens of these set up. I have it set up so that… once a day, I get an email summary of new alerts for:

Target keyword phrases

• Target URLs
• Target product titles
• Discussion forums on a topic
• My name and my company name
• My key competitors
• Unique phrases that I created for various purpose

… You get the idea.

Click here to read Willie Crawford’s full article

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