Market research: expensive and time-consuming
Traditional market research requires a lot of effort and money. You need in-house employees to conduct the research or you have to outsource it to an agency. Whatever the case, both need quite some time to perform the job and they need to be payed. What if we told you a monitoring tool can conduct the market research for you?
Market research with a monitoring tool: 3 benefits
Monitoring tools can be used to follow up on brands and products, but you can also employ them for market research. The benefits are numerous:
- Using a monitoring tool is a lot cheaper. Compared to outsourcing the research or hiring several employees, even a paying tool will profit you.
- You stay in touch with the market by keeping your research in-house.
- You get quick results. Traditional market research often takes several weeks or even months. With a real-time monitoring tool, you will immediately get results. After a few days you will already have a good idea of people's opinions with regard to the topics you are interested in.
Where to start?
- Conducting online market research with a monitoring tool starts off in the same way as the traditional method: you have to define your research questions. What is it you are interested in and would like to find out? What do you want to achieve?
- Think about how people typically talk about your topic of interest and try to translate this into keywords. Monitoring for market research often leads to queries that are much complexer than queries to monitor a brand but that should not pose any problems. With the right tool you can define precisely what you are interested in. Here is a query I would use if I wanted to look into people's opinion on Facebook and Google+ usability, restricting my search to the UK.
- Fine-tune your queries by limiting them to specific countries and languages. Indicate which sources you want to monitor: news sites, blogs, social media, etc.
The results
Once you have set up the account, you should keep an eye on the results you are collecting. Are they relevant to your research questions? If not, you can filter out the irrelevant results by excluding specific keywords, authors, languages, etc.
Once you are perfectly satisfied with the way your keyword queries are set up and the results are all relevant, you can let the tool work for you. Give it a couple of days or weeks, and you will be able to export various interesting results, as answers to the research questions you want answered:
- Top conversations
- Top keywords
- Top influencers
- Total buzz, if required specified according to source, country, language, etc.
- And so forth
Dig in deep by filtering the results
Depending on your research topic, chances are high you will get a large amount of results. Thanks to filters and (automatic) tags you can focus on whatever part of the data you want. And if you have then found what you need, export the data in a clear report: a list of results in pdf or excel, charts, visuals, etc.