Menu
At Owl Street Studio, we believe design and marketing should do good and that no one should be excluded from the table. That's why we partner and volunteer with SCORE - an organization that provides free resources and one-on-one mentorship to entrepreneurs and nonprofit leaders across the country.
And in 2021, we partnered with SCORE to present the workshop “Moving Your Idea to Market” at Forward Fest in Madison, Wisconsin. Forward Fest is Wisconsin's largest technology and entrepreneurship festival. The festival holds over 40 different events, brings in more than 5,000 attendees, and continues strong into its 13th consecutive year.
And in this section of the Forward Fest workshop, Owl Street Studio’s founder, Brian Rawson, talks about the different ways you can use the internet to research your marketplace today. And to learn more about Forward Fest and SCORE visit:
Molly Walsh: We have one question from Mike George.
Brian Rawson: Yeah, please.
Molly: He really liked your emphasis on the importance of market research, and he is wondering what are current strategies for doing market research online?
Brian: Sure. Well, thankfully the internet and technology in that way has made things so much easier. You can get so much information just from really just sitting at home.
Brian: I always am looking at Census data. There's, whether you can get directly from the Census site on the government website. Or there's lots of sites like DataUSA.io (trying to remember my own web link) that takes the Census information and puts it together in an easy to read format. So I’m always going for Census information.
Brian: Pew Research Foundation is another one I'm always using. It gives a lot of great research on big social trends.
So if you use Pew Research to look at the big picture, you can combine that with surveys and customer interviews, to then get to, get to know people on the one-on-one basis or wherever you're at, and kind of compare and contrast.
Now you might be able to get good Zoom meeting information and talking to people, but you always want to fact check that to make sure your, your little interviews are not giving you skewed or biased information, if that makes sense.
Brian: So, Census data, Pew Research, online surveys, one-on-one interviews as well as there’s all kinds of great business information. You can get a lot of insider information on your competition just from looking at business reviews, latest statistics, as well as just combing through their own websites. I mean everyone puts…to reach people you have to put everything about you online, which that’s great when you're researching your competition. They put it out there for you.
So you can comb through their social media, their websites, look at how they write about their products, how they talk about it, read reviews about it.
Brian: And you know (COVID pertaining) a lot of places you can just walk-in. So other stores or venues or restaurants, you can just walk-up, walk-in. They don't know you're another business owner. So you can get first hand experience right there.
Brian: So there's, there's a lot you can do, but hopefully that helped answer that. I know that was a lot. Yeah, any, any other questions on that? Or anything else?
George Wennerlyn: Any more questions of Brian? Thank you, Brian.
Brian: Yeah, of course. So thank you guys.
---End of Transcript---
Navigating today's marketing and market research is tough. So, if you ever need help with your market research or with any other obstacle currently standing in front of your long-term goals, give us a call. Schedule your free starter meeting below.
