Market research and marketing research are keys to having a strong marketing program. The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently launched a web page on their website to help small businesses get an edge on their competition.
The free tool, called SizeUp, helps businesses identify new customers and compare their performance against other businesses in their industry with data collected from hundreds of private and public sources. The tool can be found at www.sba.gov/sizeup.
“Market research and analysis is critical for the success of any small business owner or entrepreneur. Tools like SizeUp deliver data right to the fingertips of business owners to help make smart decisions and have the greatest opportunity to start, grow, compete and succeed,” said SBA Administrator Karen Mills. “In today’s challenging economic environment where small businesses create nearly all net new jobs in the U.S., help for small businesses is more important than ever before.”
The good thing is, you only have to register with an email. The bad thing is, I couldn’t get it to work correctly.
Personally I’ve tried using the tool twice on two different days but had some trouble getting it to work correctly. Perhaps they are still debugging it.
I wanted to post a link to it so that it doesn’t get forgotten, because when it does work, I think will be helpful to small businesses who are looking for information.
The first time I used it, the competitive businesses were not very well known or in the correct area for my business. The second time I tried it a few days later, the program didn’t recognize the industry, even when I selected one from the auto prompt and wouldn’t move forward.
Hopefully they will have all the bugs worked out soon, because it looks like a great tool for business professionals who are trying to gauge their relationship to competitors.
