“Some people use research like a drunkard uses a lamppost: for support, not illumination”
– David Ogilvy
“The most valuable feedback you can get is whether someone, regardless of what they tell you, will actually hand over money for it.”
– Darren Dahl
How to Assess the Market Potential of Your Idea
Darren Dahl offers 6 ways to test your business idea in order to determine if it will succeed in this Inc. article. As noted above, one of the best pieces of advice he offers is “Sell something, Anything.”
www.inc.com
Market Research for Small Business on a Shoestring: Surveys and Focus Groups
This column recommends identifying your target market first, and then conducting various types of market research to determine the wants and needs of the market. For instance, you can use SurveyMonkey.com to create an online survey and get your potential customers to answer a series of questions about their specific desires.
www.startupnation.com
How Marketing Research Can Benefit A Small Business
Joy Levin explains the difference between secondary market research and primary market research. You can learn about some of the different resources available for secondary market research and how to collect information by using primary market research.
www.smallbiztrends.com
How to Research Your Business Idea
Karen E. Spaeder outlines the key steps necessary to evaluate your business idea using market analysis. She recommends analyzing a business idea from four different perspectives, including: company, competition, customers and collaborators.
www.entrepreneur.com
6 Common Market Research Mistakes of Small Business
In this About.com article, Darrell Zahorsky describes why many small businesses either forgo market research altogether or rely on poor sources of information. For instance he suggests that only using your friends and family to test out your idea is not the best approach since you are getting a biased opinion.
www.about.com
10 Free Market Research Tools for Small Businesses
This web page has a list of links that you can use for conducting marketing research. Prepared by Tracy Sestili, it lists websites like JigSaw and the Internet Public Library.
www.socialstrand.com
Conducting Online Market Research: Tips and Tools
In addition to identifying some of the traditional online marketing research tools, like Google keyword searches and reading blogs, this page provides some good advice on how to create surveys. It explains why your questionnaires shouldn’t be too long and include a lot of open ended questions.
www.inc.com
Introducing New Products: Why do so many new products fail?
Beyond the product itself Michael T. Brandt, offers up some other ideas on why products fail. For instance, if your advertising starts before you have product ready to sell then you are setting yourself up for failure. He makes the point that many items need to be coordinated across the entire business in order for a product to be successful.
www.inc.com
Using Social Media to Test Your Idea Before You Try to Sell It
This article written by Melinda Emerson appeared in the New York Times You’re the Boss column describes how you can use social media tools, like Twitter, to test your ideas. She provides numerous examples of how entrepreneurs have successfully reached out to their social networks to learn about the types of features and pricing they would find valuable.
www.nytimes.com
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