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

Our goal in our experiment was to engage our community and measure the response. We used HootSuite / Twitter, Facebook (both Dinkum Interactive & Rick’s personal page), LinkedIn groups, and LinkedIn profile, along with an Email blast and online survey provider Survey Gizmo ; the survey was intended to last for one week.

The Background of the Social Media Project

The experiment started on Wednesday November 4th with the creation of a basic online survey using Survey Gizmo. Using a simple single-selection survey we uploaded photos of the three eyeglass frames and asked users to vote for their favorite.

Option # 1	Option # 2
Option # 3

On November 6th, a post announcing the experiment was published on Dinkum’s blog which was accompanied by an email to those subscribers. Furthermore, a series of tweets was scheduled to be made via Twitter (200+ followers) throughout the weekend using HooteSuite’s “Send Later” utility. Finally, while Dinkum tweets were fed to the MyDinkum Facebook page, an event inviting friends to take part in the poll was created on Saturday. In addition Rick posted the survey to his LinkedIn profile and a few of the many groups he belongs to on LinkedIn.

The Results of Our Social Media Project Were:

• 170 Completed Surveys
• 279 Abandoned Surveys
• 449 Total Visits to the Survey Page
• 61% Survey Completion Rate
• 114 Click-Throughs Via MyDinkum Hootsuite/Twitter Accounts
• 31 Click-Throughs Via Personal Hootsuite/Twitter Accounts
• 51% Email Open Rate
• 18% Email Click Through Rate
• Geography: Concentration in the Northeastern US

And the Winner Is…

The Handsome & Newly Bespectacled Rick Simmons

What We Learned

After quickly assembling the experiment and reviewing the results, here are a few observations:

Our community has a great sense of humor, as evidenced by the four suggestions that Rick try contacts (if he could, he would) and one suggestion for a new face (once again, he would if he could). Interestingly, a few people thought that we should have shown more of Rick’s face – obviously, gluttons for punishment.

Having a Fun Subject with a Small Time Investment is Helpful- Our overall aim was to explore this new avenue of communications in an attempt to actively engage users and find Rick some snappy new glasses; we accomplished both goals – Thanks!

Advance Testing Would Have Helped – We rolled the experiment out fairly quickly and didn’t have a chance to review the survey software in advance. SurveyGizmo.com did fairly well, but it was a bit light on stats. There were also a few broken links that were distributed; again not allowing enough time to test was to blame. Finally a high abandonment rate makes us think that usability may have been poor, so testing would have helped here too.

Finally, Several Other Observations Include:

1. The Rollout Should Be Carefully Timed to Achieve Maximum Impact
2. A Focused Call to Action is Helpful
3. A Unique, Trackable URL Should be Used to Evaluate Each Platform
4. Take advantage of as many available channels as possible. Some may surprise you

In conclusion, we were excited about the response our experiment received. It was fun, Rick found a new set of glasses and the everywhere Rick has gone in the past several weeks, the “Help Rick Pick His Next Set of Glasses” has been the main topic of conversation.

Thanks to all who participated

What are your thoughts? What could we have done better?

Bill Rowland