See the Big Picture Using Google Tools

This post corresponds to podcast Episode 2: Research Your Market with Google Tools which is included in the Free Marketing Made Easy Core Program, and is accompanied by workbook and video tutorials that show you how to do this on your own.

Selling can be a pretty complicated process. Why is it so perplexing? Because customers rarely make intellectual purchasing decisions. The fact is, that as consumers we typically buy based on emotion. You may like this product over that one for some whimsical reason that most marketers would be hard-pressed to discover. So what’s a business owner to do?

How can you be sure that you are offering the right product or service – the choice that will attract customers and keep them coming back? The first step is awareness: you need the basic information that will allow you to determine whether you have a differentiated product. From there you will also need to calculate whether or not your offering could be profitable. So here’s how you can gather some basic market research for free.

Step 1: Start with a standard Google search.

Unless you are in an extremely small, local market, you are probably going to get more results than you can possibly analyze. This will be especially true if you sell a product (rather than a service). In that case, you will need a better way to filter the results. So you could either use the “Advanced Search” feature, or…

Step 2: Go over to http://images.google.com.

This service gives you a much better visual representation, with far fewer results.

Step 3: Reset your browser to www.google.com/products.

Try the same search term you’ve been using, and see what you get.  If you find this page useful, you can filter even further by using the “Advanced Product Search” feature (click on the top right link from the main Google/products results page). When sorting through the results, it might help you to manually create a spreadsheet that captures competitive data including websites, product(s) and pricing. Yours might look something like this:

Let’s review: If this were your project, what might you have learned so far? Several things:

1. You would know who your competitors are. This is great information because you could now leverage Search Engine Optimization to appear above them in Google results. We cover SEO in this post.
2. You could have determined where the closest competitive products are priced.
3. You might also have noticed that some companies are making a huge profit by offering “free shipping.” In our example, they are charging $17.33 (on average) for something that probably costs them around $7. So that little “free shipping” gimmick is netting them an extra $10 profit on every sale.

At this point you are probably wondering how many units can you sell? This is a key question. To answer it you can use two techniques:

1. Engage in a bit of competitive intelligence: call your direct competitor and ask about their business. You’d be surprised how much information people are willing to share, but don’t misrepresent yourself!
2. Now use Google’s Keyword Tool to determine how much demand there is for your kind of product or service.

By the way, have you noticed that you haven’t spent any money yet? If you get red lights during this process (there’s too much competition or the selling prices are too low) then bail out at any time and move on to a more lucrative endeavor. That’s smart business! And that’s exactly why you want to research your market before you make costly investments. The best marketing in the world can hardly make up for poor business strategy.

Step 4: Use Google’s keyword tool.

Go to Google’s keyword tool and enter the terms that people might use to find your products and services. When the results come up, sort them based on “monthly search volume.” This will help you understand how much traffic those terms generate, an important first step to sizing your market.

When you do this on your own you will see that you can export the results to an excel file in order to sort the information.  This is helpful because not all of the terms will match your desired results. Additionally, the keyword results screen suggests alternative words that you will also want to include in your market data analysis. So download those too, sort them and add them to your first list.

In the case of Free Marketing Made Easy, for example, here’s what you might come up with. Note that you’ll want to hang on to this information, because you might end up building a website and/or or deciding to optimize your search rankings for some of these terms:

Since Google has about 65% of the search market, you want to multiply your results by 1.35 to get a better estimate of real monthly local or global demand. This is a very loose comparison. Google search demand does not directly equate to the amount of product or services sold, but this is a starting point.

From here you might be willing to invest just a bit of capital to test out what you have learned. For example, you could build a website and let it run for a while to see how much traffic you get. In our Building Your Website with WordPress section we’ll explain how you can do so very inexpensively.

Once your website goes up you’ll be looking to see how much traffic it generates and how many people click on the shopping cart.  It doesn’t matter that you have nothing to sell yet, so long as you indicate somewhere that the product is not yet available (don’t do anything misleading). The point is to know what would happen if you did have product to sell. Let’s say that you would be able to get product in place within 6-8 weeks.  If your pilot test runs well and you get a lot of clicks on your shopping cart, you know that you’ll be able to get back your inventory investment and start a profitable business.

Now think of some ways that you can use this process to evaluate your real market.

While you’re doing that, let’s also turn to the next session to see how we can use Rypple to get feedback about your current business or your ideas for new products and services.