Whether you're just planning to start up a business or looking to expand an existing enterprise and enter a new market, it's really important that you carry out thorough and detailed market research before taking the leap.

You need to be knowledgeable about your target market and prospective customers if you're going to be able to write a convincing business plan, which you might have to do if you're looking for funding for your business.

The type of information you need to gather includes:

• Details about your proposed market: is it growing or shrinking, and what kinds of trends are influencing it?
• The customers you plan to sell to: who are they, how old are they, where do they live, how much do they earn, and what kinds of products and services do they typically buy?
• Technology and legislation that has a direct effect on your market - and likely future trends or developments that will have an impact.

You can sum up the type of data you need to gather with the acronym PEST, which stands for the political, economic, social and technological factors that affect different sectors and markets.

A lot of really detailed market data is only available in expensive research reports from specialist researchers like Mintel and Keynote. Executive summaries and even full copies of these reports are often available in local libraries, so it's worth checking this out before forking out hundreds of pounds.

It's also well worth consulting the trade association for your business sector to see if it holds any market data - many trade bodies produce their own annual or quarterly reports on trends influencing their sector. Go to www.taforum.orgfor a comprehensive directory of trade associations.

You can also do a lot of the groundwork yourself by using the internet to research your market. You'd be surprised how much data is freely available if you know the right tools and resources to check out. Try some of the following as a starting point:

• UpMyStreet is a great resource for checking out your target customers in terms of what they earn. You can confine your research to a specific postcode, which means it's useful for small businesses with a primarily local catchment area.
• The Government's Office for National Statisticspublishes data from the last national Census in 2001. This provides detailed information about people's age, income, employment status, level of education and ethnicity - again, useful when you're putting together profiles of your target customers.
• News aggregators, blogs and press release newswires such as PR Web are a great way of keeping up to date with new developments and product launches in your sector.
• You can also use the internet to monitor what your competitors are up to. Tools like Alexa will give you traffic reports and details about incoming links to your rivals' websites, which can help you understand what you're up against when designing your own site.

It's also worth brushing up on your internet search skills. There's a lot more to using a search engine than simply typing in your query and pressing ‘go’. For instance, most search engines have advanced search options that let you narrow down your query to a particular country or time period.

You can also use canny tricks such as enclosing your search query in inverted commas to return only results containing that precise phrase. Check out www.google.com/help/refinesearch.htmlfor a tutorial on getting the most out of searching on Google.

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