Business and Entrepreneurial Research: Finding Market Data, Competitor Information and Other Tricks to Learn Your Market

Planning to launch a business?  In order to put together a great business plan and get a sense of how much money there is to make (hopefully!!) you will need to do some research. Failure to plan is often planning to fail, and that is especially true for entrepreneurs. Data related questions and answers are an extremely important piece of entrepreneurial research. Think about it. How many people live in a specific area that you want to serve? Do they fit your socio-demographic profile? Who will compete with you? How much money do your competitors make? How much are consumers spending on certain products? The answers to these, and other questions form the bedrock of marketing research. Finding this data can be time consuming if you are not sure where to look or how to start.

This book is designed to help students and entrepreneurs learn how to investigate and discover relevant marketing data for assignments and research. We will show you how to find this information using both paid research databases and free websites. We will also discuss some other strategies like surveys, interviews, observations, landing pages, fake ads and other creative approaches to collect the information you need. We will go step-by-step showing you how to use these resources to locate competitor information, demographic data, consumer expenditures and more.