Secondary Market Research

SECONDARY RESEARCH

Because of advances of technology it is now possible to improve marketing effectiveness by gaining knowledge about market & competitor information. As companies mature, the online market is getting very competitive. Also the opportunity to protect from online marketing is increasing. Many agile marketers have been able to convert the opportunity into profitable business models. There is a lot of literature on how the big giants of online marketing like Amazon and others have succeeded in the business. However a lot of potential exists for small and medium businesses also, that has not been tapped to the fullest extent. Competitive intelligence on your online marketing efforts will increase your ROI on marketing efforts.

A typical company wishes to commission research with the basic objective to understand the selected topic using information that already exists on the internet.
 To get visibility on the nature of the market for the products of interest
 Understand the customers for the products
 Understand the advisors and providers for the product
 Understand the future potential of the product
 Understand history of the market and trends within the product line
 Understand the customer perceptions for the product

Typical information areas for the secondary research are as follows:
 Size of market
 Customer profile
 Provider profile
 Trends and forecasts
 Major players in the market
 Various perspectives on the topic

Some of the types of competitive analysis that can be conducted using secondary research are;
 Monitoring of competitor Pay Per Click and SEO strategies
 Monitoring of the online chatter
 Webpage traffic monitoring
 Internet traffic analytics and optimization
 Qualitative research to online positioning

SECONDARY RESEARCH PROCESS
It is important to follow a rigorous process to conduct secondary research. Typically the secondary research involves the following steps.


STAGE 1 - UNDERSTANDING THE RESEARCH BRIEF
Understanding the research brief is an important part of the entire secondary research process. This involves understanding client expectations, deliverables from the research and the timelines very clearly. This is an interactive process between the eMpulse team and the client and the eMpulse team invariably comes up with queries and questions about the research brief. Once the research brief is clearly understood, then it becomes the basis on which the entire activity is carried out.

STAGE 2 – IDENTIFYING APPROPRIATE KEY WORDS
Quality and depth of information collected during the secondary research depends to a large extent on the key words used during the survey. Considering this, lot of importance is given to identifying appropriate key words at the beginning of the activity. This is an interactive process within the team and lots of debate goes into identifying the key words

STAGE 3 – COLLATION OF DATA
Collation of data will be carried out using the keywords identified during the previous stage. This is an intensive process and the focus would be on collecting as much data as possible using the keywords generated earlier.

STAGE 4 – SUMMARISING OF DATA
During this stage, data collected during the previous stage will be reviewed to eliminate duplication and inconsistency. This is an important stage of the entire process and has an important role in ensuring the final quality of the output.

STAGE 5 – INTERPRETATION AND PRESENTATION OF DATA
The final deliverable of a secondary research project would be a report which would contain an interpretation of data collected during the assignment. The report will be customized as per the needs of the client and can be given in either MS Word or MS Power Point format
Monitoring online information to support your marketing information needs can be very labor intensive.
The task is simple, but the volume of work can be very big even for a medium sized e-commerce efforts.



Case Study

Situation
A medium sized online retailer who provides replacement components to a category of consumer electronic gadgets wanted to increase their SEO and PPC penetration. The replacement product they were selling had very strict OEM compliance specifications. The primary mode of selling for this successful company was through online channels. Cataloguing the OEM models of all the major product manufacturers and the specifications of the replacement component is very labor intensive. The information is available on the World Wide Web, but it takes lot of efforts to assemble a database by collecting information one product at a time.

Research Conducted
An India based research team of a reputed agency developed a database list of all the OEM products and the specifications of all the replacement components. This was done for many of the global markets of the company. The data was reviewed for quality by an independent quality assurance team. The data was then cleaned and prepared for easy database upload. Finally the data was uploaded into client’s SEO and PPC campaign e-commerce database and made live on the internet.

Results
Value priced output gave a very high return on investment for the SEO and PPC campaigns. The sales increased by a significant percentage because of the number of additional models that was introduced into
the online market. The profitability of the client went to the next level without a need to change the scale of current operations. The output derived by conducting the competitive intelligence exercise using internet secondary research, took the client’s online marketing efforts to the next level. Now there is a whole range of new market possibilities due to the high value output provided by the market research analysts.

Secondary research analysts should provide solutions that are practical in nature. It is important to keep in perspective how to generate data and convert it into information that can help develop actionable
recommendation that gets executed at corporations. Successful analysts need to be very innovative in
secondary data collection methods. A combination of theoretically sound methods coupled with research execution savvy enables an analyst to provide business value using secondary research.

For your secondary research needs, contact us at www.empulseglobal.com