The brainstorming process
Here are the best questions to ask yourself:
- What experience do you have in the retail world?
- What professional experience do you have that could potentially crossover into the retail space (ex: graphic design)?
- What do you buy the most of?
- What do you dream of owning for yourself?
- What is The Age range or generation
- What is The Location
- What is The Gender
- What is The Race/Ethnicity
- What is The Household income
- What is The Education level
- What is The Occupation
- What is your Hobbies/Interests/ passion?
- What is your Lifestyle
- What is your Personality
The best resource to use here for confirming demand is actually Amazon. You can take your product keywords and pop them into Amazon’s search bar. A basic review of the results will give you an indication of the number of competitors you’ll have, the popularity of the items, the starting price points and other specific indicators. While you won’t necessarily be using Amazon to host your shop (we highly recommend using Shopify), it’s still a great way to scope out your online competition as Amazon is a widely popular starting point for shoppers in North America and abroad. Similarly, if you’re located elsewhere, you can use your region’s version of Amazon (ex: Alibaba Express).
AMZScout
(Free trial. Prices start at $14.99 per month)
When it comes to understanding what is happening in a market, there is no data more useful than sales numbers. AMZScout is an innovative eCommerce software that provides sellers with the insights they need to identify items that have high profit potential.
With AMZScout you can:
- Get stats for every product, including average monthly sales, reviews, sales history, and more.
- Review demand and competition levels for both products and niches.
- Predict costs and profit margins.
- Track seasonal trends and consumer behavior.
Qualtrics Panels
(Contact us for a demo and quote)
It’s hard work finding the right respondents for your surveys, and a survey that no one takes is pretty useless. When you deploy our panel team, you’ll get access to hundreds of thousands of opt-in survey respondents, both B2B and B2C, who are already vetted and qualified. When our team handles your research project, you’ll be able to:
- choose any target audience and access a representative sample
- boost the accuracy of your tracking studies sampling that’s 47% more consistent than standard sampling methods
- get support for your best-in-class study at every stage, from survey launch to results reporting
(5-Day Free Trial)
The quickest and easiest way to perform market research has to be GrowthBar. The Chrome extension allows you to do market research on the fly from the comfort of your Google search page -- instantly unlocking critical data points about your competitors or any website and the growth channels and keywords that are working for them. This data will help you identify what others in your space are doing as well as identify which marketing channels may work to grow your own business.
See the following data for any website:
- Domain Authority
- Organic Traffic
- Top Organic Keywords
- Top Paid Keywords
- Suggested Keywords
- Keyword Search Volume
- And much more
(Prices start at $70 per month for 1 creator, rising to $278 per month for a team.)
Tableau is a tool for data visualization that needs no programming knowledge. It helps you see and understand your market research data pictorially, using analytics, visualization and business intelligence.
It works like this:
- It extracts data from PDFs, Excel, text, R, Hadoop, Python or SAS, to cloud databases.
- The Tableau desktop takes the data, analyses it, then presents it as an interactive and shareable dashboard which shows trends and variations with colorful charts and tables.
- The data can be published, with features such as collaboration and automation included.
- Users can view their visualized data on platforms such as email, mobile and desktop.
Insightful, rigorous and transparent data. This is what you can expect from The Pew Research Center, a non-profit organization that conducts research and analysis across a diverse range of areas. These include:
- US politics and policy
- Public opinion polling
- Social and demographic trends
- News and media
- Science
- Religion
- Technology and the internet
- Hispanic interest
- Global interest
- Social media
- Online privacy
- Broadband access
- IoT (the internet of things)
Described as the Pew Research Center’s sister site, and created by The Pew Charitable Trusts, Living Facts has the simple strapline, ‘about Americans today—who we are and how we live. Our goal is to inform and inspire. That’s it.’
With clean, colorful design and infographics, and chock-full of statistics, educational quizzes and fascinating facts, Living Facts covers:
- Communities
- Democracy
- Demographics
- Faith
- Health
- Money
- Trends
- Work
There’s nothing to top the data to be found in the US Census when it comes to free market research.
Start with Data Gems, videos that explain how to access census data to inform your business decisions.
Then dive into the data, with useful tools that cover:
- Economics: the Consumer Price Index and Bureau of Economic Analysis
- Money Statistics from the Federal Reserve banks.
- Income: Earnings by Occupation and Education and Income Statistics.
- The labor market: Employment and Unemployment Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- Industries: North American Industry Classification System or NAICS system.
You need to create surveys for a number of people so that they are representative of your target audience, but you don’t know how many. What do you do? Use our sample size calculator.
Put in:
- confidence level
- population size
- margin of error
Google Keyword Tool (Free)
Where eyes are the window to the soul, Google Keywords are the window to the web. Google’s keyword tool is very popular as it accesses the best data – Google’s.
To start you will need to create a free AdWords account to access all the results.
This Google tool shows you:
- the volume of keyword searches
- how competitive those keywords are
- how keywords are related to each other
- limit your keyword searches to a language or geographical area
- limit searches to only those on mobile devices
- filter results by your chosen criteria
Would you like to know what everyone’s saying about your brand? Social Mention scours more than 100 social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, blogs, videos and images for mentions of your brand, competitors, or any keywords you wish to input. Then, it gives them to you in a single information feed.
You’ll get four key metrics:
- Strength: How much your keywords crop up on social media.
- Sentiment: Positive vs. negative mentions
- Passion: How many people are repeatedly talking about your keywords.
- Reach: Range of influence, i.e, how many individual users are mentioning your keywords.
While Google Trends has some crossover with Social Mention, it has the added feature of factoring in data from the Google search engine in addition to social platforms.
Google Trends:
- Shows how frequently your search term is entered into Google compared with the site’s total search volume over a specific period of time.
- Provides keyword-related and geographic data about Google’s users.
- Can be used for comparative keyword research and to uncover keyword spikes triggered by events.
- Gives you a more comprehensive perspective on the news, opinions, posts and perceptions affecting your brand.
This tool will give you all the information you need for uncovering market trends, understanding consumer behavior and gaining market insights, ready for your product launch. You’ll find everything from high-level insights to deck-ready statistics and useful marketing tools.
Using fascinating and useful content from Google, using data from their digital searches, Think with Google will inform your marketing campaigns by:
- Making sense of the data with articles that explain its implications
- Highlighting trends in real time
- Showing what other companies have achieved
Facebook Audience Insights (Free)
With around 2.45 billion monthly active users, marketers are missing a trick if they don’t track social media giant Facebook for marketing purposes. And Facebook Audience Insights will give you information about two groups:
- People connected to your Facebook page
- People on Facebook generally
- Demographic information: age, gender, job titles education, relationship status
- What people like: hobbies, interests, pastimes
- Lifestyles: location and relationship status combine to identify the types of people interacting with your business.
R Studio (Free)
Sometimes it just feels good to get your hands dirty romping through raw data.
- R is free language and environment software for stats computing, data manipulation and graphics, and you’ll need to install it first.
- R Studio gives you a range of statistical analysis tools to use with R. It requires that you know some coding, but it gives you tremendous power to create custom statistical analysis. RStudio is a free, open-source integrated development environment, which means it’s constantly being improved by the data-analysis community that uses it.
(Book a Stats iQ demo)
Stats iQ may be the polar opposite to R Studio because you can do hardcore stats analysis without needing to be a hardcore stats wonk. It’s the world’s most powerful statistical analysis tool, that also happens to be the world’s easiest.
Stats iQ automatically:
- finds relationships in your data
- shows how strong those relationships are
- runs the right statistical tests and visualizations
- translates your results into simple language that anyone can put into action.
Make My Persona (Free)
Every marketer knows that buyer personas help your business focus time and resources, and inform product development and marketing. A buyer persona is a model of an ideal customer, created through market research and existing customer data.
Make My Persona helps you create these semi-fictitious characters in seven simple steps that you fill in, including:
- Demographics
- Industry
- Job responsibilities
- Reports
- Goals or objectives
- Preferred method of communication
- Biggest challenges
- Anything else you want to include
Percent Change Calculator (Free)
You use percent change to track change over time – e.g. the fluctuations of sales, subscriptions, or prices of financial securities.
For example, you sold 15,000 bicycles this year, and 9,000 last year. You want to know the percent change of your sales:
15,000 (new number) – 9,000 (old number) = 6,000
6,000 x 100 = 66.66666
9,000
You’ve sold 67% more bicycles this year.
But do you want to do this calculation every time? No! Put your two values into a simple percent change calculator and it will do the math for you.
Trendwatching
Trendwatching provides a similar service to Google Trends, however rather than allowing you to explore the data for yourself, it provides free publications on nearly any topic. The website provides reports on regional consumers, as well as uniquely tailored publications to tackle nearly any contemporary topic. There is a goldmine of free information provided in the reports and it can be used to further understand the market you are operating in, or even form the basis of a forward thinking strategy.
One report in particular that we would recommend to anybody looking to understand general consumer trends and how they are changing is the 10 Trends for 2015. This highlights ten important opportunities for innovation that businesses can make use of and integrate into their current strategies.
Omgili
Omgili is a simple tool, but one that is great for monitoring consumer opinion of your brand, product or service. The purpose of this tool is to search a huge list of discussion forums and message boards for any specified keyword. Searching the name of your brand (or even competitor’s brand) gives you the ability to effectively measure brand sentiment. By combining this tool with some basic analytics, it becomes very easy to measure the public favourability towards your brand in addition to how content is filtering through the internet.
Spezify
Spezify is similar in concept to Omgili. It is a simple search engine that makes the measurement of brand sentiment and web presence an easy process. However, rather than searching message boards and forums, Spezify searches online social media. The result is a mood board style results page that provides links to pictures with your keyword in the anchor text. Pictures are collated from a wide range of sources including Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, eBay and more.
Combining the results from Omgili and Spezify can provide a fantastic overview of brand presence. In a digital age where dyadic conversations between business and the consumer are becoming a thing of the past, regaining control and being able to understand consumer interaction with your brand is a powerful tool and can help shape future brand strategies.
YouGov Profiles
The YouGov Profile Builder
The YouGov profiler is one of our favourite entries to this list. It seems, at first glance, similar to Google Trends. However, the insights it can provide are much more detailed and targeted at your specific audience. Start by searching an existing brand, personality or object. YouGov will then spend a few moments building you an aggregated profile of the average consumer based on your search. The kind of information provided ranges from basic demographic to personality and lifestyle factors. You can even discover what other brands are popular with the average consumer, and what media they consume.
To make the most effective use of this research tool, we would suggest either researching your own brand and analysing whether the results match your expectations, or researching competitors to identify gaps in the market that can easily be filled.
Consumer Barometer
The Consumer Barometer is our third entry on this list from Google: the masters of free, accessible data. The aim of this service is to help you understand consumers’ internet usage habits across the world. There are two distinctly different ways to use this tool. The first is to explore the key findings from the research. Provided in animated infographic format, this sums up the key trends & statistics that will help you understand consumers’ internet usage habits.
The second way of using this tool is the Graph Builder. This is a powerful tool that allows you to access the full data from the report. Broken down into country grouping, you are able to explore how consumers interact online and build these findings into your own research.
Statista
Research Reports from Statista
While in many aspects Statista are paid services, there is also a lot of data sources that you are able to access for free. Simply enter your search terms on the homepage and browse the numerous reports on offer. This tool is fantastic for researching industries and understanding the nature of the competition. Free information includes the relative size of an industry, average expenditures, and even individual company expenditures.
Alexa
Alexa is another great tool for researching a competitive market; however the information provided generally refers to a company’s web presence rather than necessarily its performance as a whole. This tool can be used to either research the position of your own web presence, or that of your key competitors. You can also see in what aspects you outrank your competitors and vice versa, which can form the basis for target and goal setting activities.
Some of the information provided by Alexa includes: audience demographics, geographic breakdowns, web traffic analysis and related sites. It is worth noting however that not all websites will be able to access Alexa’s data depending on their size, so when conducting your research, try to focus on your larger and more prominent competitors.
FlexMR Platform Demo
For more detailed online consumer research, you can book a free trial of our unique FlexMR software. We offer a dedicated platform that is capable of hosting both qual and quant research simultaneously for even greater results. Our flexible tools and service levels mean that you can mix and match tools to suit your exact needs and pay only for what you need. This system is capable of accommodating any type of research community, panel or ad hoc activity with online research tools spanning the entire qual and quant spectrum, social and mobile integration and available in over 60 languages.
Our clients have enjoyed the benefits of easily being able to add extra tools to the platform in a quick and effective manner, as well as generating rich insights that have helped build business strategies, competitive market analyses and more.
What are your preferred online research tools? There is a huge amount of free data available online and we know we have only just scratched the surface with this list, so let us know what tools you would recommend in the comments below.
To book a free trial of the FlexMR research platform and make use of our wide range of quant & qual tools, click here. Or, click here to read more about the flexible service levels we can provide.
Feedly
Technically a feed aggregator or reader, Feedly allows you to easily follow and get updated with your favorite websites and blogs. Adding sites to this tool can be a little time-consuming, but after you do, browsing content and discovering trends will be as easy as counting one, two, three. The service is totally free, and you can access your feeds anywhere you go through the Feedly app, which is available to both iOS and Android users.
BuzzFeed
Aiming to share “The Viral Web in Real Time,” BuzzFeed is a great resource of the most popular and controversial topics and happenings online. As a user, you can get updates for almost any category and country there is and you can also offer insights as to what you think people ought to know about.
Viral Video Chart
Sometimes, words are just not enough, and if you feel the same, then the trends you probably want to follow are certainly video trends. For this type of trends, Viral Video Chart is the best tool to use. Having partnered with several prominent sites such as Mashable, AdWeek, and Guardian, it helps you discover the most-shared videos on Facebook and on numerous blogs. You can easily organize the list by source (i.e., Facebook, Blog, or All) and date (e.g., 24 hours, 7 days, etc.).
Tracking trends in your chosen industry can get a little boring and repetitive. However, continuously tracking trends can help you develop a more effective marketing plan, make the best business decisions, and achieve success in a shorter amount of time. Would you not want to get those awesome benefits?
Market Insight
It’s an unique amazon seller analytics that provides everything you need to know about your target market.
Just type in a root keyword and wait for 30s, you will be presented with a full-scale analysis of the market of your interest: profitability, market trend, competitive landscape, entry barriers and your business advantage, etc.
This proprietary tool has already helped over 90K users make wise investment into the already crowded space of FBA sellers. So if you are selling (or plan to sell) on Amazon, this is a tool you definitely have to try!
Trend Hunter
With 20,000,000 monthly views, TrendHunter.com is the world's largest, most popular trend community. We leverage big data, human researchers and AI to identify consumer insights and deep dive opportunities for the world's most innovative companies, with our research and workshops helping over 900 brands, billionaires, and CEOs to date.
Trend Hunter is a source of inspiration for industry professionals, aspiring entrepreneurs, and the insatiably curious. We're currently studying more than 450,000 cutting edge ideas using over 3 billion choices from 235,000,000 people. Each day, Trend Hunter features a daily dose of innovative ideas, viral news, and pop culture, filtered into clusters of inspiration for our custom trend reports, helping brands and businesses every day to create the future.
Fun Facts
• 3,500,000,000 all-time views
• 20,000,000 monthly views
• 450,000+ online references
• 500,000 trend-based ideas
• 64.6 ideas / day
• 260,000 Trend Hunters
• 2,600,000+ Facebook Fans
• 220,508 Twitter Followers
• 250,000+ Newsletter Subscribers
• 50+ Financial Times citations
• Read in 195 countries
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