The American Marketing Association defines marketing research as “the function that links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through information.” Information is knowledge; and knowledge is power.

There are many ways to find information. I want to share three very powerful tools that give results in real time and best of all completely FREE.

Google Trends & Google Insight for Search

Google Trends displays on a graph over time the number of searches for one, two or more keywords. When you know the trend of searches on a particular term, you can have a clearer picture. Here is an example:

PPC vs. SEO vs. SMO

If you were in internet marketing, you might want to focus on providing search engine optimization (SEO) services instead of pay-per-click (PPC). Also, social media optimization (SMO) might represent a good business opportunity since this tactic appears to be relatively new to the public.

Google Insight for Search is the advanced version of Google Trends. You can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, and time frames. Here is an example:

Myspace vs. Facebook

Where would your company rather be Myspace or Facebook?

Twitter Search

Twitter is obviously the hottest spot for social media in 2009. Twitter Search is a tool that allows you to see what people have been saying (or twittering) about a certain term. The term can be anything relevant to your research: your brand name, your competitor’s brand name, a trendy product, etc.

Twitter Search is not only a research tool, but also a communication tool. Once the results are displayed, you can pro-actively participate in a conversation.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts are updates directly to your email of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, blogs, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. The best usages for marketing purpose are:

• industry updates
• competitor news
• brand monitoring

I have a Google alert set up for the terms “chom chom advertising.” Whenever a website mentions those words, Google Alerts will provide me the url of the source.

Google Trends, Twitter Search, and Google Alerts are simply great as a starting point for your marketing research. Should you base all your decisions based on the information provided? May be, may be not. It really depends on the complexity of the information you are looking for.

Are you using any of the tools? For what searches?

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This post is tagged Google, twitter