Google Maps

There are a million things that can affect the sales of a brick and mortar business. Area competitors, availability of complimentary services and traffic sources are just a few. Google Maps is a great tool to help traditional businesses improve their understanding of what is affecting the business.  Competitors, access to public transit, complementary businesses and public attractions can be easily added to a private map with just a couple clicks of a mouse.

Online Surveys

Every business needs feedback. Online surveys can provide a quick and easy way to ask existing customers and prospects their opinions on a variety of topics. With services like SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang, it can be cheap too. Furthermore, online surveys don’t have to be complex as long as you follow a few online survey tips.

Website Research Tools

Whether a business is developing its own website, creating content or investigating its competitors, there are and endless supply of research tools that can be used to provide insight.  Here are a few:

SEOMoz Term Extractor – Want to get an idea of which terms your competitor is targeting? While you can start by looking at a web page’s Title Tags and Meta Description, the SEOMoz Term Extractor will offer some helpful advice.

Yahoo Site Explorer – Many consider links as a form of web currency. Businesses interested in who is linking to their competitors can use this tool to identify competitor linking strategy and even find a few link candidates of their own.

SpyFu - Pay Per Click marketing can be very productive and understanding what keywords are being targeted by competitors can offer some valuable insight. SpyFu is a tool that can do that.

Website Analytics

It only makes sense to understand what a business’ existing website visitors want, so using a website analytics package is crucial. Website analytics packages like Google Analytics, Clicky, Mint or one of the many other analytics packages offer businesses the ability to get a better understanding of their users at very little cost. In addition, it’s equally important to spend the time to translate the data generated by any package into useable information. Just as Avinash Kaushik, he’ll tell you.

Twitter

While Twitter may not be the right tool for every business’ social media marketing efforts, it can be a great research tool. A quick search of Twitter using keywords and themes can uncover a great deal of information an opinion on a given topic. For those companies that actively use Twitter, asking Twitter Followers is a great way to quickly get opinions on products, company performance and many other areas.

In conclusion, these are just a few low/no cost online tools that I feel can be useful to businesses. What tools do you use for market research? Please share them in our comments section.

Bill Rowland