Online Web Research Services & Data Research, Data mining

Small businesses play a major role in the economy. According to Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses represent 99.7% of all the employer firms in U.S. Though small businesses constitute major portion of all the businesses, they always struggle to sustain. SBA says that nearly 70% of small businesses perish within 10 years. There are many reasons for a business to fail and some of the major reasons are lack of proper planning, lack of industry knowledge, inefficient marketing, unable to differentiate between a true opportunity and just a new idea, lack of competitors' intelligence and poor pricing strategies.

Unlike large corporate executives, small business executives or owners are hands on. They can easily have direct customer feed back and see actual ground reality. However, they also need big picture perspective and this is what it is missing. Earlier to get holistic picture of their industry environment, small business owners had to wait for a magazine or newspaper to do a cover story. Now they can search and find lot of information on Internet. Let us see how web research can help small businesses -

Defines marketing problems and opportunities in local markets
Small business owners are close to their customers and have a clear sense of their needs. However, there is chance to get carried away in identifying the opportunities and threats in the market. Web research begins with identifying the issues on a broader sense from different angles and defining the problems and opportunities. It captures the vital information on product consumption, the product substitutes and their reputation as well as other data that can trace out the problems and build the case.

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