The goal of marketing research is to understand what is happening in the market and how this affects consumer behavior. Marketers require a lot of data to do this successfully, but they should not settle for just any kind of data. It is important to stress the need for relevantdata sources, one of which is a WHOIS database. In this post, we illustrated the benefits of WHOIS data in conducting marketing research as offered by companies like https://whoisxmlapi.com.
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What Is a WHOIS Database?
A WHOIS database is a repository of all registered domain names, along with the details their owners provided during the domain registration. Among the key data points found in a WHOIS database are:
- Domain registrar
- Registrar’s contact email address
- WHOIS server
- Domain name
- Domain creation date
- Domain update dates
- Domain expiration date
- Domain status
- Domain availability
- Registrant name
- Registrant’s email address
- Registrant’s organization name
- Registrant’s street address
- Registrant’s phone number
- Registrant’s fax number
- Nameservers
- Administrative contact’s name
- Administrative contact’s email address
- Administrative contact’s organization
- Administrative contact’s street address
- Administrative contact’s phone number
- Administrative contact’s fax number
4 Benefits of a WHOIS Database for Marketers
More than 330 million active domain names worldwide exist today, with thousands more registered each day. These numbers show that most if not all organizations have an online presence and are managing their respective websites. As such, a WHOIS database can be a lucrative source of data for marketers, as it gives them insights into what is happening in the virtual world.
Among other things, a WHOIS database helps marketers in the following ways:
- Detect trends in top-level domain (TLD) distribution
- Get insights for competitor analysis
- Gather relevant contact information
- Determine location-based trends
Detect Trends in Top-Level Domain Distribution
In the early days of the Internet, .com was the TLD of choice of any organization that wants to establish an online presence. Aside from its popularity, .com and other original TLDs, such as .net and .org, conveyed reputability and trustworthiness. These days, however, almost any TLD is fair game.
Filtering a WHOIS database to show the domain names under a specific TLD would give marketers insights on what companies or sectors use it. From another perspective, such data could also provide marketers with intelligence on what TLDs major industry players and competitors are using. For instance, studying the domains that use the .shop TLD could help marketers detect e-commerce trends.
Get Insights for Competitor Analysis
Aside from discovering what TLDs are used by key industry players, a WHOIS database can also provide more insights on what competitors are doing. You can filter domain names by registrant name or organization, allowing you to see all the domain names another company owns. For instance, if one of your competitors is a company named “Zyda,” a WHOIS database would reveal that it recently registered five domain names. Such information would give you an idea about its plans and new ventures.
Gather Relevant Contact Information
The strategy above also works if you are looking for suppliers and other third-party partners. A WHOIS database not only gives you a list of domain names, but it can also provide registrants’ contact information, provided this is made publicly available upon registration.
Determine Location-Based Trends
A WHOIS database can provide insights into trends in a particular location.
First, marketers can retrieve domain names under a specific country-code TLD (ccTLD), such as .us for the U.S., .uk for the U.K., .ca for Canada, and .ch for Switzerland.
Additionally, they may filter the domains in a WHOIS database by registrant country, state, and city to determine marketing trends.
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WHOIS data most often reflects the state of the online world, which would also most likely reflect what is happening in the economy. That is true, especially now that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to going digital. Almost every industry and company has to utilize the Internet amid lockdown policies to keep up. The four above-mentioned benefits of WHOIS data can make marketing research more relevant, comprehensive, and data-driven.
