Not only a single business but the foundation of any business depends on the research. A detailed study about the market for your product, your competitors, your target audience and their presence (where they spend most of their time) everything plays a major role to accomplish your success.

In Business, you can research about your competitors, their marketing strategies and knowledge about your customer behavior will help you to build an effective strategy for your business.

Now, there would be any confusion in your mind like

How should I start my Research?

Is there any tool available for such research and If so, is the tool-free or paid?

Don’t worry, we are here to help you

A sneak peek about the following

Statista & Google Trends – It is for Market Research

Google Search, Google Keyword Planner & Ubersuggest – It is for Competitor Research

Make My Persona & Facebook Audience Insight – to find and analyze your ideal customers

SEMrush & SimilarWeb – for analyzing your competitors and to build a Compelling Marketing Strategy

Come on. Let’s, Explore

Market Research

Statista – It is an online statistics, market research, and business intelligence portal that provides the necessary insights as per your queries. For instance, if you want to know the number of monthly active users on Facebook worldwide, Statista will provide the same.

Google Trends – If you visit Google Trends, you can see that “Explore what the world is searching” and it is true you can find what is trending around the world or in your country.

Find your Competitors

There are two types of categories here. One is the direct competitors & the other one is the Indirect competitors.

Direct Competitors

Direct competitors are the one who offers or sells the same product/services as you do and where they are easy to find. In the case of indirect competitors, it’s hard to find them.

Let me show you some ways to find your indirect competitors.

Google Keyword Planner – It is completely a free tool from Google where you could use this tool to find the keywords that were relevant to your industry and also you can check the competition for those keywords to promote your product/service.

Google Search – It is a hidden treasure. If used properly, it will be an added advantage for your business. Based on your product/service keywords, you can find who are all competing for the same product/service similar to yours.

Analyze your Competitors & Build Marketing Strategy

I hope now you have an idea about finding your ideal keywords and using the keywords as you would have gotten a list of your competitors.

Now, we will see how to analyze your competitors and plan your marketing strategy.

SEMrush – It’s a paid tool but you can use their 14 days free trial version. Using your competitor website, you can get a detailed report about their organic keywords, paid keywords, backlinks, ad content and even more.

SimilarWeb – It is similar to SEMrush where you can find insights about your competitors.

But before planning about the marketing strategy you need to know about your target customers.

How to find your ideal customers

Make my persona – To run a successful business you need to know about your target customers and competitors. Make my persona helps you to create a customer persona from simple questions answered by you. So that you will have a detailed picture of your customers such as their age group, demographics, and their interests.

I hope now you know your customer persona but how you can find where they hang out the most. There are many tools available to find the presence of your target customer so here we are going to see how to find their presence on Facebook.

Facebook Audience Insight – It is completely a free tool. Using this tool you can search your audience based on your customer persona on Facebook. So you can be aware and keep a look at their presence on Facebook.

Build an effective marketing strategy

Now, you have known about the market for your product/service, competitors, and target customers & their presence. After getting all the data you can build a compelling marketing strategy to compete with your competitors and attract more customers towards your services.