Marketing Research 2024: How to Find Your Competitor's Secrets (Step-by-Step)

and atlas with this magic marketing formula i shall be designed to get all the customers in the world what's going on guys hope you enjoyed that silly little intro now i have a very special video today because we're talking about marketing research and of course marketing research is important because that's something that you want to have nailed down before you even think about marketing and to support this in 2006 microsoft released a product called zune that was supposed to compete with apple's ipod but they discontinued the product in 2011 because it failed to differentiate themselves from the ipod and according to a former microsoft executive it just didn't give people enough reason to choose their product over the ipod so clearly it's important your marketing research is on point and in this video we're going to take a look at some of the steps that we take to do some market research stay tuned hey guys i'm sean with life marketing the digital marketing agency that saves small businesses from bad marketing and no growth now listen to this around half of businesses with employees don't survive past their fifth year according to the bureau of labor statistics in order to stay afloat most businesses need a steady and consistent flow of customers and you can start off on a right foot by doing some sound marketing research hey sean according to my calculations there should be a potential customer at 169 degrees longitude and 83 degrees latitude that is wearing a pink and green shirt let's go get them okay not that kind of research what i mean is that you want to look at maybe three to four high-level items that will provide you with greater visibility into your market so by the end of this video you should understand some key things that you can do right now with the internet at a very small cost that will heighten your level of success while performing marketing research and i'll be jumping on my computer to show you exactly what to do step by step but before i dive in if you love marketing you love growth and you love business and you want to learn from real practitioners then click the like button on this video so youtube will show our videos to other people like you and make sure that you subscribe to our channel alright now that's out the way let's go ahead and dive in with step number one analyze your product and your audience now chances are you already have an idea or a product that you believe millions of people will love you get a product you get a product everybody gets a product so we won't spend a whole lot of time on this part but some of you guys need to hear this okay having a good idea and having a good product is not enough you need to ask yourself why would someone use what you're offering and don't give yourself a fluffy answer like because it's cool man everyone's gonna love it once they finally try it so listen your product or your service needs to solve a legitimate problem and make sure you stick to the end of this video because i'm going to show you guys some messages that you can put together with those problems and once you figure out what the problem is you're going to realize that okay not everyone has this same problem so that's going to help you to start fine tuning your audience okay so for example a dry cleaners may initially think like hey i have the best service i have the best machines everyone's clothes are going to come out really nice and everyone's gonna love it but once you identify the problem then you may discover that the real problem is actually professionals in the area don't have time to clean and iron their clothes which will give you a much clearer audience all right once you get that together then you're ready to move on to step number two which is to determine your market size here's the deal every company has a ceiling or what some people like to call a market cap so going back to our dry cleaners example their market size may be limited to the professionals who are working within a 15 mile radius of their shop so in this case the population size will largely determine the size of their market and if they have competitors who are also within a 15 mile radius then that will limit their reach as well okay so how exactly do you determine the market size now this can get pretty deep but what we like to do is look at data from the two biggest online companies in the world which are google and facebook so i'm gonna hop on my computer and show you exactly what we do when we're trying to analyze the online market size all right guys i'm on my computer now and we're going to take a look at how to determine the market size step by step so one of the first things that i like to do is pull up a google sheet or an excel sheet so i can take some notes if you prefer google docs or a word doc you can do that as well or even use a good old-fashioned notepad and pen all right so the first thing we're going to look at is the product and the audience right so that's what we covered in the first part of this video and um i have a sample a product and audience just so we can determine the market size together step by step so the brand name is something generic we're calling it soothing bath salts the description of the product is a honey bath salt for relaxation and soft skin all right now what is the problem remember guys every product needs to solve a problem so the problem here is that it helps people with skin redness and eczema who wants products without preservatives okay so this is going to be a product that is organic and all-natural all right now who's the audience the audience is obviously going to be anybody with eczema or skin issues all right and then in the last column here refined audience that is something that you can do later on down the line once you have enough purchases that you can start to refine the audience even more so let's say you have a thousand purchases and you notice that most people buying are females between the ages of 30 and 40 and you can start using that data to refine your audience alright so let's go ahead and turn to facebook to see exactly how we can determine the market size so i am going to facebook ask manager and what we want to go to is the ad set so that we can start looking at the specific type of people that we can target and how big that audience is so we'll click on ad set here and then we'll just scroll down to the detailed targeting in the audience section we'll leave it on the united states and we may change the age let's go ahead and change the age to 18 to maybe people who are 50. all right and then in the detail targeting this is where the magic is going to happen so our product let's go back to our sheet in our notes first and foremost our product is a bath salt so let's see how many people on facebook are interested in bath salts all right so boom we found a category and looks like a hundred and seventy thousand people on facebook are interested in bath salts all right um let's do another salt let's do epson salt all right and epson salt is not coming up here so we're just going to stick with bath salt so i'm going to go back to my spreadsheet i'm going to go to a new tab and i'm going to type in um facebook audience description we search for bath salts and a facebook audience size was 220 000 people it looks like 170 000 people on facebook are interested in bath salts audience size was 220 000 people [Music] all right so now what else does our product do our product helps people with skin redness and let's say skin redness not getting anything with skin redness let's say skin care okay we got a lot of skin care options so uh we don't want people who are studying skin care they likely already have a service or product or employer that provides skin care we obviously don't want to target employers because they have products and businesses around skin care we just want to target the masses who are interested in skin care in general and probably improving the skin their skin care all right and so we saw a bunch of options let's see what else we can tag along here okay remember our product is a natural skin care product so this is going to work really good let's type in organic skin care let's see if we can find something so we have some competitors here when we type in organic skin care which we can throw in here as well all right let's see what our potential reach is so wow look at that guys we have 32 million people on facebook who are interested in something around skin care so we're going to go back to our marketed research list look to market size and we typed in uh skin care that's the core category and we're going to say this is 32 million people all right so that is really really good that's really really good all right and then of course our product solves a problem which is eczema all right let's see how many people on facebook may be experienced in this problem as well so we have the national eczema association i'm imagining that a lot of people who have eczema are following something like this um and so let's type in other eczema interests and that's all we got so eczema we got about 260 000 people who are interested in eczema on facebook so boom we just notated that and we're gonna sum all this up at the end now let's turn to google to look at what people are searching for around this topic and to do that i'm going to google ads manager we'll go to tools here and then we'll go to keyword planner and then we're just going to start running some searches so again our product is a bad salt now google is very uh high intent and is it is a large platform and if you haven't seen quran's video on facebook ads versus google ads then make sure you like you watch that video i'm going to link it up above so we're going to search for bath salt we want something hyatt so we're going to say bad salt for eczema all right bad salt for eczema that's going to be the search look at this we got bab saw for xml 260 times per month being searched epsom salt for eczema 880 times being searched and then we have some longer tail keywords here that are not very significant maybe 5 50 to 10 searches so overall it looks like this is about a thousand searches per month so i'm going to go back to my market research and we search for bath salt for eczema and we had about a thousand searches per month now since that was per month i'm going to multiply that times 12 to think about how big the audience size is over the course of a year all right so for that particular search term we can reach about 12 000 people uh in a year all right so now what else what else let's go back to our product and audience what else could we search so um um let's think about ezima eczema honey eczema honey as a search keyword so let's say egg honey all right that is uh within our product and look at that guys eczema honey gets searched 14 800 times which is huge and so we're just going to type in xml honey as the search keyword and that was 14 800 searches we're going to multiply that by 12. and we have about 177 000 people that we can reach through that search all right which is very very good all right let's go ahead and throw one more search work search term here um thinking about our product again our our product is helping people with redness so we'll type in skin care for redness as a search result and yeah here we're getting about a thousand searches per month when searching for skin care redness so we're just going to go back to our sheet skin care for redness and we're going to give it a thousand searches time 12 and we'll get that 12 000 people in our audience size per year once again all right and we'll just go ahead and sum these particular searches up sum this up really quick and then we'll sum it up here and then boom we have an estimated audience size of about 33 million people maybe two maybe a little bit less than that but that's how we can start looking at the market size of course you can get much deeper than that continue to play with other keywords in both facebook and google so that you can put together a very accurate market size but if you're just starting out then this is probably enough to get you going all right i'm gonna hop back in front of the camera to discuss the next steps so as you can see if you spend some time playing with these two online data giants and you'll quickly start to get an idea of the market size and of course you can use data from other online platforms like bing twitter linkedin and more to help you define your size even further hey sean shouldn't we aim for the biggest market size possible not necessarily so even if you have a big market it comes down to how many competitors are in that market or as some others would ask how saturated is the market which brings us to our next point step number three competitor research now i've heard over and over again statements like man we're doing something that no one has ever seen before so we don't have any competitors or our offer is so unique that noi and i mean no one can really compete with us but here's the reality even if your product is unique remember it has to solve a problem so you're actually competing with any company that is currently solving the same problem as you even a company as unique as uber when it launched still had to compete with taxis and they still kind of are to a certain extent okay so i'm gonna demonstrate step by step how to go about doing some competitor research and we're gonna hop back on my computer and turn to social media and search engines once again all right guys i'm back on my computer now and this time we're going to be doing some competitive research all right so you want to make sure you're paying attention because this is really important for your marketing research all right so remember earlier we calculated our market size this time we want to see exactly how many competitors are within that market size all right so we'll go back to our market size tab here and we did some keyword research for bath salt for eczema and we found that 12 000 people searched that every year so i'm just going to copy that keyword phrase we're actually going to go to google.

com and search it to find out how many competitors are already taking advantage of this search so the first one i see here is eczema honeyco so i'm just going to click on this website and we're going to copy copy their domain here and we're going to add them to our competitor tab right honey co all right and then i'm gonna use one of my favorite tools sem rush to do some competitive research you can also use a website like similar web to do some similar things all right so one of the things i want to go to is a competitor research toolkit and then go to our traffic analytics and traffic analytics are going to start showing me how this company is generating their success right now online all right so off the bat they're getting 113 000 hits to their website every month so safe to say that this company is already doing a really great job so let's see where this traffic is coming from so this blue line here is the direct traffic which means a lot of people already know about this website but because they're going straight to it they're typing in eczema honey cold calm straight from their phones straight to their browsers all right so that is about 67 of their traffic they're also doing some paid google ads which is bringing in about 20 percent of their traffic they're doing some seo that's bringing in about nine percent of their traffic some social media that's bringing in just two percent of their traffic and they have just about zero percent referral traffic all right so we want to look at this pay and search and try to combine these to figure out how much traffic they may be good getting from a place like google so we have 22 000 plus 10 000 we're just going to say that it is about 24 000. so google traffic in our spreadsheet we're going to note at 24 000. i'm just going to make this a number because that's how i like to make it and boom all right and then next we will look at the domain authority now if you don't know what domain authority is then make sure you watch the seo video linked above but essentially the domain authority is going to tell us how powerful their website is so i'm going to go back to semrush to figure this out and i'll go to let's see if i can get to domain overview here and we should get our domain authority or what some seos call authority score and we have a 38 so 38 is their domain authority we're just going to note that here then we want to look at exactly how much they're spending with those google ads that we saw they had earlier which again sem rush is going to show us so we're going to click on paid search traffic and let's see how much they're paying for this traffic come on it's loading up taking this time here all right and traffic costs they're spending about five thousand six hundred dollars every month for this traffic all right so we're just going to note that as their campaign budget spin up fifty six hundred dollars every month turn that into dollars boom all right and then social media traffic so we wanna see if this company is advertising on social media in order to do that we can go to facebook's new ad library which i just love and so we can come here and type in eczema honey coke and let's see if that comes up yep we got their company right here and look at that we can spy on their ass guys this is so cool so right now it looks like they just launched one ad campaign in may of 2018 and outside of that they don't have any ads running right now so um with this particular ad they spent about six hundred dollars but again it's not active and we can see the ad that they ran here looks like a little video um showing how a kid used their product so over here for social media traffic um we really don't have to put much here we can stay in a an estimated spin they really aren't spending anything on social media so we'll say n a again all right let's look at one more one more competitor research or competitor for this space so i'm going back to google we searched uh bath salt for eczema let's pick a new search let's go back to our market size and let's search eczema honey and google all right let's see what companies come up now so look at that we got eczema honey dot co coming up again they're clearly dominating this space um they're here at the top of the search engines here all right let's go back to our market research and see skin care for redness let's find another product for skin care for redness all right so we have the dermstore.

com all right so we're going to click on that again copy the domain name take it back to our market research tab and we're going to look at pasting their name here and then we're going to go and look at their google traffic all right so let's go back here competitor research toolkit let's do a traffic analysis and let's type in their domain right here the durham store and wow this company is huge they have 4. 5 million visitors to their website every single month so this is definitely a company that we can pay attention to and it looks like a lot of traffic is coming from search just organic search and they're doing a little bit of paid advertising as well so we have 1. 4 million in seo and 111 000 and paid google ads so we'll just call this about 1.

5 million in google traffic all right so that is huge let's turn this into a number all right yeah so 1. 5 million hits in google traffic now that's pretty high guys i normally don't see stats like that but that is definitely something to take a note of and as you see again they don't have a lot of social traffic that's only bringing in about one percent paid traffic bringing in about three percent referral at four percent so a lot of people just know who they are and they're going directly to their site or they're finding them on seo alright so i'm imagining that this site has a huge domain authority but let's take a look and note this down all right so their authority score is 64. 64.

that is a pretty good domain authority for that space now let's look at how much money they might be spending in paid traffic and they are spending looks like they're okay so this is a little off they uh their traffic costs cost about 1. 4 million but this isn't exactly what they're paying for because they have so much organic traffic so we're just going to actually just ignore this from now and just leave this in a now let's see if they're doing any social media ads the durham store derm stores the name so let's go back to the facebook ad library type in the derm store and here they are let's see if they're running any ads right now and yeah guys they're running some ads it looks like they have a three or four running right now these could be retargeting ads let's click on some of the ad details and see what information we get so now a lot of information on the ad spin just click on another ad yeah so we're not getting a lot of information on the ad spend here oh here we go so they spent 739 dollars here uh let's see what time period that may have been not quite sure the time period was 739 is what they're spending in facebook ads and um yeah guys so uh 739 is not going to get you a lot on facebook so i'm just going to estimate maybe they're at a dollar maybe two dollars per click so we'll just say this times 1.