9 Methods for market research on no budget

During a recession market research is important as explained in the previous post.
As budgets are tighter or you need to limit your expenses, you will minimize spending on market research.
In order to do so, you can start to look on and use the Internet.

1. Spying your competitors:
Look into their websites and search on the Internet in order to find traces of their new initiatives.
Compare functions and features of your competitors in a spreadsheet.
If they are traded on the stock market, listen to their quarterly earnings conference call or read their quarterly reports.

2. Investigating the market:
Search the Internet in general for conferences or events in order to gather relevant information for free. This is not the same as attending conferences, but it is at a much lower cost and requires less time.
Search for presentations from conferences or events to look into the messages inside.

3. Listen in to webinars
Signup for webinars from consulting companies in need for customers, or even web conferences from your competitors.
You can always try to pose questions which might give you answers as people always tell more than planned.

4. Spy your customers and leads on your website:
Analyze the search queries of your website visitors, in order to know what they are looking for when they arrive on your website. For this purpose additional content related to your products and services will bring more visitors, thus also more search terms used.
Organize this search data by business segment, by type of business, split up customers and leads in order to get an overview and spot a trend. (This requires a service that reveals the company names of your website visitors like LEADSExplorer)

5. Blogging for reactions:
If the company has a blog, new ideas and concepts can be explained and explored, having reactions measured if there are any comments upon your blog posts.
However these new ideas are also available to your competitors, who will be grateful for your initiative and will investigate in the reactions of the public including your customers.

6. Search social media and blogs:
Search social media for statements related to your business and the sub seeding comments.
Search blogs and review the comments made in order to grasp the tendencies and the changes in the market.

7. Generate responses on social media
Use social media, as an individual not related to your company, to:
- Pose questions
- Make interesting or bold statements
- Challenge people
in order see what reactions these generate.
Of course as comments are posted only by a minority of people, this is not always representative for the whole population. Still it can bring forward good indicators of future trends or current mindset.

8. Use RRS feed filtered using Yahoo pipes
There is too much information available on the Internet.
There are too many RSS feeds that can be interesting.
Use Yahoo Pipes to aggregate, mashup and filter out the interesting posts on keywords.
Just like this example of sales and marketing blog aggregation
That should keep you up-to-date at no cost.

9. Do not spend on industry analyst reports
By not buying reports from Forrester Research, IDC, Gartner, Butler group, Ovum, Yankee Group, Aberdeen Group, Celent, Bloor, Datamonitor, Frost & Sullivan, JupiterMedia, Patricia Seybold Group, Saugatuck Technology, Yankee Group, you will save a lot of money.
They have been interpreting the facts, figures and events just like you do and probably as biased.
On one hand they have more overview on the market, but you are in the business and you meet customers expressing their needs.

Still if you can get a copy of a research on the Internet for free then read it.

Even on no budget market research can be done in order not to miss completely on the next new or improved product or solution.
The main expense is of course your priceless time. Less is more?