Google Insights for Market Research

An important step in online marketing research includes understanding search patterns and visitor behavior. Tino Triste's latest post on I-com details how you can use Google Insights to help do just that. Google Insights helps marketers in several ways by finding popular key phrases for your market as well as generating geographical heat maps which shows where there is greater demand for products and services. Tino gives the example of searching for the term 'gardening supplies' for a fictitious company called Gardening Outlet Ltd. By searching in the United States, Tino was about to figure out that there was a greater demand for 'gardening supplies' in states like Oregon and Colorado. This step in preliminary market research is crucial and it can help companies analyze results before moving forward with a new business venture. Tino describes how Google Insights can be used for marketing research, but what are some other applications and methods that your company uses to conduct preliminary research?