Five Easy Tools for Market Testing a Concept

At Team and a Dream, we strongly advocate market testing services/products or concepts to gain market feedback. We've been doing a lot of this recently as part of our Internet Marketing Strategy offering, mostly testing out different messages to see what resonates with our clients' target market. Besides the traditional A/B testing approach with Google Adwords (which can be a bit complicated if you're not familiar with it), here are other tools you can use for market testing or to de-risk an idea:

1. Facebook Advertising – Unlike Google Adwords, Facebook allows you to target your exact audience. Within their advertising platform, you can drill into specifics such as age, gender, location and a lot more. It's a simple process - you create your ad, choose your audience, price your ad and you're all set. For more information, check out the Facebook Advertising page. Better yet, try it for free by downloading Visa's Business Network application and receive $100 worth of free Facebook advertising.
2. SurveyMonkey – Rolling out a new concept? Put together a free 10-question survey and send it to your clients and/or prospects to gain feedback on what they think. The key here is to ask the right questions. For better conversions, offer some kind of incentive (the best are those that allow you to cross-sell your own services).
3. Dneero – This services allows you to "create multi-question conversations" that you can have bloggers post about to gain feedback from your target market. Although I haven't used this personally, it looks fascinating - drop me a comment if you've tried it. You can find more information on their site.
4. Google Insights – This free tool from Google allows you to look at all Google web searches since 2004. How can this help you? You can use the tool to gauge the popularity of a specific search term. Check out this screencast (I apologize in advance for the sound quality) I previously put together that takes you through a fictional scenario to see how you can benefit from using this tool for market testing.
5. Ideablob – A great platform that allows you to submit your idea with the chance to win $10,000 while obtaining feedback from voters. What do you have to lose? You either win $10k you can use for your concept or you gain feedback and advice from others.

Have you used any of these tools? Let us know how they've worked for you by adding a comment below.

If you decide to stick with Google Adwords, check out Steve Barsh's 2-part series on ways you can de-risk your idea using Google Adwords.

Related entries:

• 5 Benefits of Market Testing your Idea
• Finding Diamonds thru Market Testing
• Build a Landing Page you can be Proud of

By: Yasmine Mustafa

Comments

[Accounting]

Starting a small business requires a lot of time, patience, energy and cash. Find out what you need to make sure you're in a business long enough to realize the success you have always dreamed of!

[Social Bookmarking Submission]

Social Bookmarking is becoming an alternate to search engine, they are updated by the real user who would like to refer some of the best sites over the web along with its title and comments.

[Jeff Paul Internet Millions]

Hi, I read your post and found it a very interesting. I run a blog on internet marketing. The reason why I started my blog is that I found it quite flexible and good marketing strategy.

[hulk]

The content you have provided is pretty interesting and useful and I will surely take note of the point you have made in the blog.

While I was browsing the Internet for ways to boost my website exposure, I read about how effective offline media is for getting additional exposure. Since online media advertising has become so competitive, I thought I will complement the online marketing efforts of my products with offline media advertising like newspaper and magazine advertising. This can be the best way to get a wider coverage for a website and draw additional traffic. I think it is a great marketing strategy to use both online and offline advertising to get more customers.

I thought this information might be useful for anyone looking for solutions to get more traffic to their website.