Beyond using the Internet to have a presence online to serve as a shop front for you business or getting the pulse of your current market trends. There are resources that can give you secondary data to look over demographic data, and industry trends by professional business analysts. These are just a few of my favorites that took me through my undergraduate career.

The CIA Fact sheet is a great place if you are working internationally. Want to know how your business partner ‘s currency measures up to yours? What the key industries in a country are? Cultural norms? This is place to look for it.

Want to learn more about the people in your area? The highest paying zipcode in your region? The racial demographis and psychographic evaluations? What better place than the Census? It takes a while to sort out the information. Unlike the super snazzy analyst membership or software what you get out of this is raw data. It’s pretty time consuming but knowing your target market and where you are in terms of geographically can be priceless for your future business strategies. Only con for this is you’re going to have to keep an eye out for the dates and make sure you factor in any important event that may have affected your area.

If you want to cliffnotes for a company this is the place for you. Want to see what other competitors are doing? What leaders in your industry are doing? This is the place for you. In general you can get the basic information free however you are also given the option to purchase more in depth reports. Also since Hoover’s only reports on publically traded companies you won’t find any privately owned company’s information.

This is information that is packaged nice. As a visitor to the site you can access only a little bit of the data. Like Hoover’s, Mintel requires you to pay a certain membership or subscription to use their database. But what you can get for free is pretty awesome. (Many a Industry Project paper written by me have had Mintel articles in the works cited.)

My Godmother just recently sent me a link to this site–I wish I’d know about this a solid 3 years ago….>.< Want to check out up coming research from business models and marketing strategies? This is the place for you.  It’s a great place to find articles about upcoming trends.

With these tools alone you can make an educated decision about your businesses future and evaluate what you’ve been doing right and what you’ve been doing wrong. It’s no guarantee that what these analyst say is going to happen will happen. However, as my marketing research professor said over and over again, Knowledge reduces uncertainty.

Article by: Andrea, Bracket Innovation’s Sales & Marketing Lead — Known to some of you as: BizGrrl on the Road