Gleanster Offers Easy Access to Market Research

Today I wanted to share a resource with you that I just learned about; Gleanster.  There are two things you should take away from this resource:

1. Great secondary research for anyone dealing with technology companies and products.
2. An interesting market research opportunity for professional market researchers.

First, let’s talk about the secondary research component.  Back in the day, secondary research wasn’t all that exciting – or informative.  Of course you had demographics and some completed market reports that you could buy for thousands of dollars.  But these often didn’t provide the information you wanted or needed and you were left with data holes that needed to be filled with expensive primary research — or you just took what you had.

Gleanster is yet another resource for market data that you can use in your marketing plan — especially if you’re in the technology industry.  Here’s what Gleanster does:

Gleanster benchmarks best practices in technology-enabled business initiatives, delivering actionable insights that allow companies to make smart business decisions and match their needs with vendor solutions.

You’ll find the following kinds of reports on this site:

• How Top Performers Achieve Business Objectives
• Social Media Monitoring
• Social Media Marketing
• Lead Nurturing

And many, many more.  This is a terrific source for best practices in a variety of areas — no matter what your industry, you will get worthwhile insight into what the best practices are.

And if you’re thinking that your industry isn’t represented and it won’t be worthwhile for you — I would disagree.  One of my favorite marketing strategies is called “adapting.”  That means that you look and see what other industries are doing and adapt it to your own.  So don’t discount this wonderful market research data resource.

How is This a Market Opportunity for Market Research Professionals?

Gleanster speaks to an interesting trend that I see popping up — ready access to data.  Instead of seeing yourself as market research providers — you can see yourself as an information provider.  With the rise of DIY Marketing and DIY Marketing research – marketers and business owners that would normally HIRE a market research firm are spending their time and money researching and consuming ready-to-use-data.  In other words, what might have been considered PRIMARY research data is now secondary research data.

Think about that and let us know how this trend occurs to you.  What have you seen in your world about how your customers look for data and in what ways you can take advantage of this trend.