How to do a market research quickly and for free?
How to do a market research and how to analyze the performance of my future competitors quickly and for free? This is one of the questions we ask ourselves when we want to start a business, or launch a product.
Why you should do market research in the first place ?
Whether you are an entrepreneur, a consultant, a freelancer, or a blogger. You have to be able at some point to do market research if you want to make good decisions to boost your business.
If you want to start your own business, or launch a new product, you need to do a market research to analyze your competitors so you can choose the right strategy.
If you are a blogger, you need to look at the competitiveness of the keywords you are targeting to find the best SEO strategy to rank higher in search engines like Google.
And if you’re a consultant, you should always stay tuned to your market to advise your customers the best.
The more you know how to get this information, the more you can make informed and relevant decisions.
So in this article you will discover several techniques, tools and platforms that will help you yo answer the question: How to do a market research quickly and for free following the 5 steps mentioned below:
Step 1: Analyze accounting data and employee opinions
Step 2: How to do a market research by analyzing the sites of your competitors?
Step 3: How to do a market research by analyzing social networks?
Step 4: how to do a market research by analyzing a sales tunnel?
Step 5: Monitor competitors to update market research.
Step1 : Analyze accounting data and employee opinions
Let’s start with the simplest idea.
To do an effective market research, you must first list the different players in your market to know who are your direct and indirect competitors as well as your potential partners.
To get to know these players, that is to say, to find out what these companies are, when they were created, how much profit they generate per year, how many employees work there, and who are the decision-makers in these companies.
The first website is societe.com
On this site you will be able to find the share capital of the company, its date of creation as well as its turnover (often paid data).
Note:
A. Some companies do not deposit their accounts, which means that you will not be able to see their results, balance sheet, etc.
B. This website is for French companies, let say for instance, you are looking for American companies, the trick is simple, just go to Google.com & search for “USA search any company data” and you will find this website:
https://business.dc.gov/research_business_info
This teick applies on any country, just change the term USA to your desired country.
The second site is LinkedIn.
I’d like to give you a more original platform, but LinkedIn is a gold mine of business information.
The advantage is that it is free and constantly updated by the actors themselves.
On this platform you will find all the information relating to employees and decision-makers.
It’s also a great way to do business intelligence.
To do this, simply follow the company page and see the employees who work there.
This always gives you a good idea of the number of employees even if it is not perfect.
Job search websites
You can also analyze sites via tools like Glassdoor.com where employees can leave reviews on their employer.
It’s a great way to find out what’s right or wrong with a business, like products, wages, atmosphere… etc.
Step 2: How to do a market research by analyzing the sites of your competitors?
Analyzing a website is an important skill to develop to gather useful information for decision-making.
By developing this skill you can for example:
- Decide whether or not it is worth collaborating with a company
- Choose the best promotion channel for your business
- Choose the tools and technologies to use for your business
- Know how to structure your sales tunnels
- And more…
In the following parts, we will see some tools and platforms that will allow you to answer these questions.
SimilarWeb
Similarweb is essential when it comes to analyzing a competing site.
Indeed it not only gives you its world ranking, but also you can know your position online by having an estimate of the number of visitors / month and many other data and information.
You can thus locate your site in relation to the various competitors.
SEMrush
SEMrush is the essential tool to closely analyze your competitors’ traffic.
You also have an idea of traffic (with a focus on Google SEO, while Similarweb is more global), but you have many other very valuable information such as the web pages that generate the most traffic, an estimate of advertising expenses Google Ads, keyword recovery rate, and much more.
Like Analyzer
Like Analyzer is a free tool that allows you to analyze the statistics of your competitors’ Facebook pages to find out what their fans look like.
Link Analyzer is a free SEO tool with which you can collect a lot of interesting data.
You can for example know the volume of searches for specific keywords as does Google Keyword Planner.
You can also see the difficulty level of the targeted keywords.
If you are a blogger, this tool is very useful for choosing which keywords to target to write your articles but it is also useful for all entrepreneurs in general because it allows to know the extent of a need.
If you are a consultant for example and want to develop a new service, you just need to do some research on Ubbersuggest to get an idea of the need for this service.
By typing keywords into the tool, you may find a great opportunity with a high volume of research and little competition.
Ahrefs.com
Ahrefs is also a powerful tool for analyzing any site.
When you enter the url of a site in the search bar, the tool tells you backlinks and SEO analysis. While Ahrefs site Audit tool will analyze your website for common SEO issues, and keywords rankings.
This data can help you choose the content to produce and the keywords to focus on, but also on which sites you can create backlinks.
Note: you can also use tools like Yooda.com,
SEO quake
SEO quake is a free chrome extension that allows you to get a lot of data on the sites you visit.
You can for example know the age of a site and the number of existing pages of this site.
What use are you wondering?
Well if it’s a competitor, it will give you a better idea of the authority of it.
If you see that the site was created a long time ago and that it has several thousand pages, you will be able to consider that the site is influential and you will be able to adjust your marketing efforts according to this.
And if you are looking for a site on which to create backlinks or to make a partnership, this extension can also help you.
If you see that the site is very recent and that it has few pages, it may not be worth spending 3 hours writing a guest article for this site because once published it will not give you any additional visibility.
This data will therefore help you make better decisions, whether with competitor or partner sites.
Moz bar
The Moz Bar is also a Chrome extension that you can download for free. It gives roughly the same information as SEO quake. I personally use this extension to quickly find out the authority of the sites and pages I visit.
If for example I go to a site that has 75/100 domain authority and most pages have 35/100 authority, I would say it might be a good idea to collaborate with that site. It certainly generates a lot of traffic and has managed to build a great community.
Site Explorer by Majestic
Majectic’s Site Explorer is pretty awesome because it shows the quality of a website’s SEO.
In particular thanks to the Trust Flow and the Citation Flow, it is possible to see if the referencing of a website is “optimized” (with many links in sites specially designed for referencing or if they are links quality). You can analyze a site in a few seconds and see the quality of its referencing.
You can check this article for more Chrome extensions for SEO : Top 10 free Chrome extensions to improve your SEO ranking 2020
Facebook Pixel Helper
If you want to know if your competitors are advertising on Facebook, 2 techniques can help you.
The first is to download the Facebook Pixel Helper. This Chrome extension will let you know instantly whether your competitor is running ads on Facebook or not. Once the extension is installed, go to your competitor’s site. If the icon turns blue, your competitor is probably advertising on Facebook. You can also go further and see specifically which advertisements your competitor is broadcasting.
On the same page click on see more and you will the ads of competitor. This can help you adapt or get inspired by your ads.
If you offer marketing services, for example, these techniques can help you know if your prospects are potentially in need of help on Facebook.
If you see that they do not have a Facebook Pixel installed and are not showing advertising when they could benefit from it, it might be a good idea to contact them and offer them your services.
Google Tag Assistant
The Google Tag Assistant is a Chrome extension that works the same way as the Facebook Pixel. Once downloaded you will have several interesting information on the site you are visiting. You will know if:
- The site advertises on Google. If this is the case, you will see the Google Ads Conversion Tracking.
- You will also see if the site has installed Google Analytics. If it has not installed it, it is likely that the site does not measure these
Wappalyzer
The Wappalyzer extension will help you know what techno a site is using. You can for example know if a site has been created on WordPress, Wix or Squarespace. You can also have information on the servers that the site uses, the widgets that it has installed.
Step 3: How to do a market research by analyzing social networks?
To analyze the social networks of a company and more particularly to know its growth, Social Blade will be of great use to you. Social Blade allows you to have a multitude of details on corporate social networks, including their Youtube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts.
To do a simple search, tell Social Blade the account you want to analyze and you will know the number of subscribers of the account, its growth, the number of content posted, the quality of the community, etc…
Note that you can analyze companies but also anyone’s account (influencers, freelancers …) provided that their community is large enough.
So what is the use of doing social networks research?
Firstly, it allows you to know the progress of the competitor in your market and to know how it develops over time, and on the other hand, it also lets you know which communication channel they prefer.
If you analyze a competitor’s social networks and see a significant growth curve on Instagram while the growth of other networks remains stable, it most certainly means that the company is focusing on Instagram to make itself known and that you Maybe you should also be interested if you haven’t already.
The tool can therefore help you make certain strategic decisions.
Step 4: how to do a market research by analyzing a sales tunnel?
Analyzing a sales tunnel is always interesting because it lets you know how a company is doing to convert its prospects into customers.
As a reminder, a sales tunnel corresponds to the different means used by a company (emails, Facebook ads, Google ads, sales calls, etc.) to gradually bring a person who has a need. to buy a product or service.
To know the sales tunnel used by the players in your market, there is no secret, you have to play the role of the prospect.
That is to say, you should pretend that you are a person potentially interested in their products or services.
To get started go to the website of the company you are looking to analyze and find what I call “the front door”. This is where you give your information and you become a prospect in the eyes of the company. At this point it may already be interesting to make a first analysis, that is to say to look at the way in which the company converts its visitors into prospects.
For this ask yourself the following questions:
- What information does the company require to access its offer?
- Just an email?
- An email, a name and a first name?
- Email, last name, first name, company name and phone number?
- What does the company offer in exchange for this information?
- A free consulting call?
- A test on its platform?
- A white paper?
- A reduction code?
- A demo?
- Where does the company collect this information?
- Is it on the home page?
- On a popup?
- On their blog?
Doing this analysis is already very useful because it will tell you how the company is doing to get its prospects.
The next step is to fill in your information to find out what’s going on on the other side of “the front door.”
At this point be strategic.
If you are analyzing a competitor, avoid giving your real identity.
Instead, use an email in which your company name does not appear.
Take a name and a first name that you invent … in short, make sure you are not recognizable.
Once you have entered your information, you will be able to break down the tunnel.
First look at the confirmation page on which you land once you have filled in your information.
Then check your emails, see what welcome email we sent you.
- What is the message ?
- Did they offer you an offer?
- Please also pay attention in the days following your registration, you will certainly receive other emails.
Break down these emails, look at the way they are written, the CTAs the frequency with which they are sent to you.
Beyond emails, also pay attention to what you see on their social networks and on Google. Because you may suddenly be targeted by new advertisements that you don’t see before, especially in your Facebook news feed, Instagram or even on Google.
If so, the company is re-targeting.
- Record all your observations on paper or in an application.
- Even though it’s very difficult to know exactly what a company’s marketing tunnel looks like, these few analyzes will already give you a good overview.
Step 5: Monitor competitors to update market research.
I will not teach you anything by telling you that it is important to keep a constant watch when you are an entrepreneur, freelancer, consultant, or a blogger. In this part we will therefore see very simple ways to do a daily watch.
Owler.com
Owler.com allows you to have a synthetic watch on your competitors every day by email. This gives you access to their most popular blog articles, news (fundraisers, buyouts, etc.) … which keeps you up to date with key developments from competitors.
- This service is also completely free.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free tool, but to be frankly honest with you one it does not perform very well. The point from using it, is to have an idea of your competitors latest feeds.
Mention.com
With a “freemium” version (free for a few keywords), Mention allows you to keep an eye on your name, your brand.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite.com is a known tool for automating posts on social networks like Buffer but it is also a very good monitoring tool.
Thanks to the tool you can create a dashboard on which you can follow in one place all the social networks of the players in your market, you can also be alerted to conversations in your industry and follow hashtags that interest you.
It’s a great tool to stay in touch with the market.
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interesting, Thank you !