It is always essential to have plenty of information before you make decisions. That is one of the basic rules in marketing and in business.
But to start with – analysing (gathering information) the market environment is the starting point for every successful business effort. A successful analyses tool includes organisational analysis, customer analysis, competitor analysis and PEST (political, economical, social and technical factors). Of these you have a short presentation above.
There are various ways of knowing how you target group acts online, what are they watching, which channels they are using etc. Without this information it is really hard to make valid and successful decisions.
However, one of the bigges challenges for companies is that they do not know where to get this kind of information and they do not bother to look for it.
Naturally, one of the options is to excecute a market research among the customers on your own, but there are several tools online that help you to get an insight how customers are acting online.
Here are a three of my favorites sitess for gathering information of the trends and customers as well as channels.
Google aims to be a leading provider of different online services for bigger and for smaller companies. Therefore they also provide lots of useful tools and information for the companies as well as they research the online environment from several perspectives. All these researcher are gathered in Think with Google where a company can find really useful tips for its online marketing. You also find information for different industries and about different platforms.
Another really useful tool is Google’s Consumer Barometer.
Here you find both local and global information about purchasing habits & decisions online as well as devices used and about videos as a marketing tool. You can also build your own graphs for comparison.
Socialbakers is also a site where you can find useful information for your decisions. If you are interested in paying some they give you detailed information of different platforms. For free you can see monthly regional reports with top brands, Facebook pages etc. as well as several industry specific reports are available.