A look at research tools

- Your success hinges on knowing your audience. Building meaningful experiences and identifying opportunities requires an intricate knowledge of who they are, their behaviors, interests, and where they spend their time online. Fortunately, there's several tools available to help you on this journey. Now, I won't go into too much depth on how to use each tool. You can explore them as you see fit, but I will focus on what the tool can provide, and a few ways you can use it. The first tool I want to look at is here at quantcast.com Now you'll need to install the Quantcast Tags to your site but, once you do, you'll be able to unlock some unique demographic metrics.

These demographic metrics will help you understand your existing customer base and the traffic that's already visiting your site. To show you what type of data you can see, let's look at goodreads.com So here we can explore the amount of visits that this site is getting, and that's great, but you'll see that in Google Analytics, but, as I scroll down, we can start to see some other really interesting information. Here we can explore everything from Gender to Income, including even Education.

What's great, too, is you can also compare your data against the averages of other sites, and even other sites in similar categories. Compare the insights that you find to that of your persona research, and see if things overlap. If not, you might need to make some adjustments to refine your understanding of your audience. You can also see if people are visiting more from home than work, which might help you as you consider how to design your product and what features might be most important. Now I mentioned another similar product earlier, and that's KISSmetrics, and you'll find that at kissmetrics.com Now I will point out that KISSmetrics only offers a 14-day free trial and, beyond that, it's a little bit spendy.

The starter plan is $179 a month, but the education you gain from this is extremely valuable. Now, for KISSmetrics to work, you have to install some tracking on your site. It needs a little bit of time to gather the data, so I'm not able to show you what the dashboard of KISSmetrics looks like, but it does make it easy to identify roadblocks that are slowing your growth. You can see where your ready and willing customers are coming from, so you can go out and get more of them. You can also link KISS to your Google Analytics account, and that'll get you a really powerful in-depth perspective of who your user is, and what they're doing.

Now, if you're looking for more generalized research, take a look at factbrowser.com Factbrowser let’s you drill into facts by demographic and category, so here, at the top page, I can hover over Consumers, and then choose an age range, say, 26-34 years old. From here, we can refine the results on the left by things like Topic, Technology, Region, or Industry, I'll choose Technology, and then choose Social Media, and what's great is we can start to see some facts around this demographic and Social Media, and you'll notice the filters that we've set, up here, in the yellow box.

You can continue to add more results to refine this Search query. This is really useful if you're building a pitch deck, or trying to validate a growth hack opportunity. Scan the facts for inspiration to see if you identify something that resonates with your audience or your objectives. Finally, I recommend taking a look at SurveyMonkey Audience, and you'll find that at surveymonkey.com/audience Traditional market research is expensive and can often be out of reach but, with SurveyMonkey Audience, you can build surveys and extend them to the exact audience you want to receive it.

You can create surveys to find what your target market thinks. You can even ask specific questions to gain valuable insights into your objective. To get started with this, you can review the pricing here on the page to understand exactly the costs associated. For example, it's typically $1 to $3 per response, and you'll decide how many responses you want to get, and how targeted you want to be. Once you're ready to get started and set up your survey, simply choose the Get Started Now button in the upper right-hand corner of the page. It's really important to invest time in your audience research.

However you go about it, collect a lot of data so you can leverage it and rely on it as you conduct your growth hacking.