Tag:research

Market research is generally either primary or secondary. In secondary research, the company uses information compiled from other sources that appears applicable to a new or existing product. The advantages of secondary research are that it is relatively cheap and easily accessible. Disadvantages of secondary research are that it is often not specific to your area of research and the data used can be biased and is difficult to validate. Primary market research involves testing such as focus groups, surveys, field tests, interviews or observation, conducted or tailored specifically to that product.

A list of questions that can be answered through market research:

• What is happening in the market? What are the trends? Who are the competitors?
• How do consumers talk about the products in the market?
• Which needs are important? Are the needs being met by current products

Market research is for discovering what people want, need, or believe. It can also involve discovering how they act. Once that research is complete it can be used to determine how to market your specific product.

Examples of market research would be questionnaires and surveys.

For starting up a business there are a few things that are important:

• Market information

Market information is making known the prices of the different commodities in the market, the supply and the demand. Information about the markets can be obtained in several different varieties and formats.

Examples of market information questions are:

1. Who are the customers?
2. Where are they located and how can they be contacted
3. What quantity and quality do they want?
4. When is the best time to sell?

• Market segmentation

Market segmentation is the division of the market or population into subgroups with similar motivations. Widely used bases for segmenting include geographic differences, personality differences, demographic differences, use of product differences, and psycho-graphic differences.

• Market trends

The upward or downward movements of a market, during a period of time. The market size is more difficult to estimate if you are starting with something completely new. In this case, you will have to derive the figures from the number of potential customers or customer segments. [Ilar 1998]

But besides information about the target market you also need information about your competitor, your customers, products etc. Lastly, you need to measure marketing effectiveness. A few techniques are:

• Customer analysis
• Choice Modeling
• Competitor analysis
• Risk analysis
• Product research
• Advertising the research
• Marketing mix modeling

Nielsen Online, MegaView Search Engine Shares 2008

Keyword research should not be undertaken ad hoc. It is the foundation for all natural search engine optimization technique.  The keywords finally selected, based on search volume and likely ability to compete, should be included in some, if not all, of the following SEO onpage elements, as well as in any anchor text backlinking to the relevant webpages:

• URL
• Title tag
• Metadata
• Headers
• Actual Content
• Navigation links
• Image names
• Alt attributes

Christine Churchill, another noted SEO expert, simply states that keyword research is the bedrock of successful web page optimization.

Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search.

Background Data US

Current data indicates that:

• 72.5% of the population of the United States is online ,
• there were 11.7 billion searches in the month of August 2008,
• the number of internet users who use search engines has increased from one third to 49% , fast catching the daily use of email by internet users (which has comparably increased from 52% to 60% over the same 6 year period).

Current data indicates that:

• There are nearly 1.5 BN people online worldwide (a penetration rate of 21.9%). This is an increase of 405% in the number of people online in December 2000.

[All the following data can be found on the InternetWorldStats.com website]

• The largest increases in terms of internet use by geographic area since 2000 can be seen in the Middle East [an increase of 1,276% since December 2000 to 42M], followed by Africa [1,131% to 51M].
• The countries with the highest internet penetration rate (all greater than 70% of their population) are: Greenland (92.3%), Netherlands (90.1%), Norway (87.7%), Iceland (84.8%), Canada (84.3%), New Zealand (80.5%), Australia (79.4%),Sweden (77.4%), Japan (73.8%), Portugal (72.9%), US (72.5%), Bermuda (72.1%),Luxembourg (71%), South Korea (70.7%).
• The countries with the largest number of people online (all above 30M) are: China (253M), US (220M), Japan (94M), India (60M), Germany (53M), Brazil (50M), UK (41M), France (36M), South Korea (35M), Italy (34M), Russia (32M).

In this highly competitive and growing global market place, for a company to understand what terminology, keywords and phrases their online target market is utilizing to search for their offering, it is imperative that the company conduct extensive keyword research.