Online marketing research

If you want to run a successful business, you must learn about your customers, your competitors and your industry. You need systematic gathering, analyzing and interpreting information about a market, about a product or service to be offered for sale in that market, and about the past, present and potential customers for the product or service; research into the characteristics, spending habits, location and needs of your business's target market, the industry as a whole and the particular competitors you face.

That process of systematic gathering, recording, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data about issues relating to marketing products and services is marketing research. Marketing research is focused on your customers and your marketing mix - 4Ps - product, promotion, price and place. The goal of marketing research is to identify and assess how changing elements of the marketing mix impacts customer behavior. There are a variety of types of marketing research tools - both offline and online - that are used by many large businesses and can be available to small and mid-sized businesses.

Online Marketing Research. The growth of the Internet has had a dramatic impact on the conduct of marketing research. Increasingly, researchers are collecting primary data through online marketing research: Internet surveys, online panels, experiments, and online focus groups. By one estimate, U.S. online research spending reached an estimated $4.45 billion last year and is growing at 15–20 percent per year.

Online research can take many forms. A company can use the Web as a survey medium: It can include a questionnaire on its Web site and offer incentives for completing it. It can use e-mail,Web links or Web pop-ups to invite people to answer questions. It can create online panels that provide regular feedback or conduct live discussions or online focus.

An online survey is a questionnaire that the target audience can complete over the Internet. Online surveys are usually created as Web forms with a database to store the answers and statistical software to provide analytics. People are often encouraged to complete online surveys by an incentive such as being entered to win a prize.

Polls are the easiest and fastest way to get your answers. Internet polls are becoming an essential research tool for a variety of research fields, including marketing and official statistics research. Web polls are faster, simpler, and cheaper than many other polling methods. Just create a poll with your predefined choices and ask your connections or general public. This is a great option for gauging the preferences of professionals, users and customers. What are you waiting for? Get your answers now! www.solaborate.com