Even though you have a great business idea, you need to make sure there is a market for it. I would tell you to do market research but you may wonder how (without hiring a research firm to do sample testing for you which can be very expensive). Here are some free or inexpensive ways that I recommend to do market research:
Check out forums. Forums and user groups are far from dead. People are discussing virtually everything on some forum somewhere. Here is a link to some of the busiest forums, but you can also do a Google search for forums by typing in your topic name (i.e. “business” plus vbulletin plus forums). So, in this instance your search would be business vbulletin forums. Look for forums with lots of activity and then check out some of the most common questions to find what users are looking for.
Next up is Twitter search. There are a variety of ways and sites to do a a search of topics on Twitter. However, I prefer TweetGrid because you can do up to 9 keyword searches at once to monitor conversations on those topics that interest you.
You can also do a Facebook search, though it isn’t as user friendly as Twitter or LinkedIn but is an option. Your search will bring up people, fan pages, business pages and some status updates.
I also recommend LinkedIn’s Question feature. A great way to see what business people have concerns about are to check the questions being asked on LinkedIn. They are divided into topics so you can search more easily.
Yahoo Answers is another choice for both research and entertainment purposes! You can expect a hodge podge of questions on Yahoo’s Q&A site, but that can be a good thing depending on your current or potential business and customers.
Though it sounds difficult, polls and surveys are actually easy for the inexperienced entrepreneur to set up. You can add polls/surveys to Facebook and LinkedIn. You can also set up a survey at SurveyMonkey and email it to a target group. For small surveys (up to 100 responders, 10 questions on the survey) it is free and, of course, it goes up in cost from there.
All of these tools allow you the ability to test and research your business idea to see if there is a viable market for it. If you’ve had success with other low-cost methods, let me and other readers know below! For more tips on marketing and more, sign up for my small “how to” newsletter here.
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