To market effectively in today’s consumer economy, an organization must invest in market research. There are a number of types of market research including interviews, focus groups, and customer observation. The most effective type of market research is generally agreed to involve a market research survey. How do you go about doing an effective market research survey?
If you want to advance your existing business or launch a new product or service with the same sense of excitement and expectancy as a FairGo casino login, consider conducting a market research survey.
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What is a Market Research Survey?
A market survey provides data on a specific product or service. Data is then analyzed so that the company has information about customer inclinations and customer buying potential. Businesses rely on market research surveys to provide them with feedback about the target audience’s characteristics, requirements, and expectations. A market survey will collect data about a business’s target audience in order to respond to pricing trends, competition, customer needs, etc.
Benefits of a Market Research Survey
Launching a market research survey is an investment in a company’s resources but the results of a well-designed and well-implemented survey can make the difference between a company’s success, stagnation, or failure. A quality survey will help a business:
- Minimize investment risk to highlight opportunities or warning signs relating to future investments.
- Facilitate strategic planning.
- Spot emerging marketplace trends.
- Stay ahead of the competition.
- Gain a better perspective and understanding of the target audience or market in order to strengthen its position and stay ahead of the competition.
- Discover weaknesses, both in the business’s own weaknesses and in those of competitors.
- Provide projections for future revenues through market forecasting.
- Evaluate successes against benchmarks.
- Focus on customer needs and expectations.
Designing a Market Research Survey
Pre-designed market research surveys are available online but if you want metrics that will give you the exact data that you need for your business, you might want to consider designing your own survey. You want the information that you need for your specific product or service so that you can craft the right marketing message for your product.
Clay Christensen, an American economist and business consultant who teaches about “disruptive innovation” (an innovation that eventually displaces established market-leading firms, alliances, and products through the creation of new market and value networks) has pointed out that of every 20 new products launched, 19 fail.
Accessing the right data can make the difference between your business keeping existing customers, gaining new business, or becoming one of the 19-out-of-20 failures.
Creating a Market Research Survey
Creating an effective market research survey involves much more than asking people questions. You need to identify your target audience by demographics and preferences and refine the parameters of the survey in a way that ensures that you will be able to analyze the results and act accordingly.
Some things that you should keep in mind as you design your survey include:
- Targeting your audience. Before you start surveying, you need to consider whom you are surveying. You want to survey people who are in the same demographic and who have the same kinds of preferences that your product/service is aiming for. You wouldn’t want to survey people in the senior citizen age bracket, for instance, if you’re selling video games. Some market surveyors ask respondents to identify their demographics at the beginning of the survey and simply discard those who don’t fit within their target demographic.
- Asking yourself what issue you will be trying to solve with the data that you will get from your survey.
- Setting objectives for the research. You need to identify the goals that you want to achieve by doing your market research. For instance, if sales are down, you might ask about how changes in the product would affect consumers’ willingness to buy.
- Setting a timeline for how long you will wait for responses after you send out your survey out, how many reminders you intend to send out, etc. Remember, the people who you ask to be in your survey are also potential customers, especially if you have their contact information archived. You don’t want to annoy them with too many messages, reminders, requests, etc.
- Creating the survey. The survey should be as short as possible and include, in addition to the demographic information that you need, pointed questions that will allow you to determine which new product, or which product changes, will bring you the greatest amount of business.
Enticing Participation
It’s not always easy to get people to complete a market research survey. Many customers are burned out – it seems like companies are asking them multiple times every week to share their opinions.
What can you do to get people to participate in your market research survey?
Appreciation
It’s very nice to end a survey with “thank you” but if you really want to convey your appreciation, develop a dialog with these individuals. Tell them how their feedback will impact your offerings. Be respectful of their time – if you promise that the survey will take 2 minutes, make sure that it takes, indeed, no more than 2 minutes to complete.
Incentives
Show your appreciation with incentives including gift cards and discounts. These types of incentives have been shown to increase response rates on market surveys appreciably. You might want to consider offering some type of incentive that’s not necessarily connected to your business so that you attract as many people as possible…..an Amazon gift card, for instance, gives people a lot of leeway in collecting a reward that suits their individual needs.
Relevance
Keep the survey relevant. Don’t offer only yes/no questions or only questions that ask for numbered responses. Those responses often don’t accurately reflect the real feelings of the respondents. Give respondents room to answer open-ended questions (“please expand on your answer”) to indicate to respondents that you are truly interested in their thoughts.
Channels
Companies sometimes rely on their email lists for all forms of communication, including for surveys. But research shows that when a customer sees a survey multiple times, they’re more likely to respond. So add the survey to your social media broadcasts and to other types of marketing messages.
Not only will you spark existing customers’ curiosity but you are more likely to attract the attention of people with who you have not been in the previous contact. The bigger your base of respondents, the more data you’ll have to analyze which, in turn, will give you more accurate results.
Doing a market research survey takes a certain level of expertise but with experience, you’ll be able to create surveys that give you the information that you need to grow your business.