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What are the things you can learn if you conduct effective market research?
Know your customers – Market research will help you better understand your customers in a number of ways including demographic information such as their age, gender and geographic spread. The better you know your customer the easier it is to fine tune your product or service towards the target market.
Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? Does your service or product appeal to specific age groups? Who are your potential customers and where do they live?
Know your competition – Market Research will help you measure your service compared to others. What are the strengths and weaknesses of your business and are you improving in the areas that customers demand?
Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Is what you offer value for money? How do your organization’s products and services match up to that of your competitors? Can you deliver, do you deliver, should you deliver?
Ease of doing business – Do your customers find it easy to deal with you and when they visit your store and/or website do they find what they want? Is there adequate advice and assistance on hand? Do you make it easy for your customers to buy? Are your employees properly trained, helpful, knowledgeable and available?
Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. What are the marketing channels that are available to you, which ones should you concentrate on and which, if any, should you consider dropping?
Is your marketing message understood? Does your marketing material properly represent your brand? Do you use the correct advertising and promotion channels? Are you reaching the right people?
With the power of the Internet it is now very easy to conduct market research using one of the many online survey software sites that make conducting surveys and collating good market research intelligence quick, easy and extremely cost effective.
Writing surveys is easy; isn’t it? The reality is that writing surveys is easy but writing surveys that will be effective is more difficult. The following are twenty tips that if followed will help you write more effective surveys.
1. What is the purpose of the survey?
There are many reasons for conducting questionnaires. By correctly phrasing the questions and structuring the answers surveys can be used in a multitude of ways and for a variety of reasons. When compiling a survey don’t lose sight of its purpose.
2. Give the survey a good title
The title of the survey is an opportunity to instantly summarise a survey’s objective and encourage respondents to participate. Respondents need to invest time in completing the survey so you need to encourage them that their investment will be worthwhile.
3. Do not make the survey any longer than it needs to be
Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Minimize asking questions that will provide you with ‘nice to know’ information and concentrate instead on ‘need to know’ questions.
4. Use plain English, avoid terminology and acronyms, be consistent and ensure that the questions you ask will not result in ambiguous answers
Word the question carefully. If a question can be interpreted in more ways than one then there is a real risk that any analysis of the resulting survey data will be worthless or at the very least suspect.
5. Avoid long questions
Where practical use concise sentences. Long questions can cause a respondent to lose concentration and can lead to a higher level of incidents where respondents abandon a survey.
6. Ask one question at a time
Avoid confusing the respondent with a question like ‘Do you like golf and football?’
7. Don’t influence the answer
Do not load the question. ‘Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell alcohol to children be prosecuted?’ is likely to have no value.
8. Ensure that the answer format used allows the respondent to answer the question being asked
Allow the respondent to answer how they really feel or they may be inclined to abandon the survey. As a last resort consider the benefit of including a “No comment”, “Can’t say” or similar response option.
9. When you are compiling your survey consider how you will analyse the results once the survey has been published
When asking questions that allow for a free text open ended response appreciate that such information is likely to be difficult to score and/or summarised. Consider how answers can be grouped. For example “Indicate your length of service?” – ‘less than 1 year’, ‘between 1 and 5 years’ and ‘more than 5′.
Group the questions into clear categories as this makes the task of completing the survey easier for the participants.
11. Target your respondents carefully
Sometimes you will want to target a specific group, in others a cross section. If you can’t control who responds to your survey consider including questions/answers that will allow you to filter out respondents who don’t match your target profile.
12. Allow the respondent to expand on their answer or make comments
Allowing respondents to make additional comments will increase their satisfaction level and will also give valuable feedback on the specific questions and/or the survey as a whole. Remember though for a large sample collection it may be difficult to analyze free text open ended responses.
13. If the survey you are conducting is to be confidential ensure that your pledge is upheld
If you have made guarantees to the respondents that the survey is confidential you need to ensure that the individual data is not shared with anyone or used for any other purpose. Confidentiality must be maintained at all times and any contact information destroyed after the survey is complete.
14. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of allowing respondents to be anonymous or identifiable
If your respondents are to be anonymous then you will be unable to follow up specific complaints or match “pre” or “post” surveys. Allowing people to remain anonymous will however allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.
15. Give careful consideration to the best response format
Being consistent with the format used for responses is good practice. When creating your survey keep in mind that when analyzing the data single selection radio buttons are easier to analyze than multiple selection check boxes. Do not use a check box if a radio response would do.
16. Advise the respondent as to the approximate time it will take to complete the survey
If the survey appears to be a stream of never ending questions then respondent drop can increase. It is a good idea to give an indication as to how long the survey is likely to take so the respondents can choose the best time to complete the survey.
17. Inform respondents of the survey end date
Encourage your invited respondents to complete the survey as soon as possible but advise the respondents of the survey’s end date so that they have the opportunity to schedule the necessary time.
18. Pilot the survey
Before publishing a live survey publish a pilot survey to check for questions that are ambiguous or confusing and to confirm that the survey is aesthetically pleasing.
19. Before publishing the survey proof read the survey carefully
Check and check again that the survey is grammatically correct and makes sense. If possible get someone else to proof read the survey before you publish, if no one else is available then take a break before checking again.
20. Thank the respondent
To complete surveys respondents need to invest their time and should be thanked either in a covering letter, at the end of completing the survey or in a follow up letter. You may even want to consider incentives such as a reward of some sort.
Market research is an essential element of any organization that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted. Business decisions that are based on good intelligence and good market research can minimise risk and pay dividends. By making market research part and parcel of the business process and conducting market research throughout the life cycle of a product or service market research will bring the following benefits:-
Market research will help you better communicate – Your current customers experiences are a valuable information source, not only will they allow you to gauge how well you currently meet their expectations they can also tell you where you are getting things right and more importantly where you are getting things wrong. By consulting with the customer you not only show them that you care but you remove the guesswork out of customer services.
Market research helps you identify opportunities – If you are planning to operate a new service and want to know the preconceived attitudes people have then market research can help, not only in evaluating the potential for a new idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to be honed.
Market research will minimise risk – Market research can help shape a new product or service, identifying what is needed and ensure that the development of a product is highly focused towards demand.
Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress – You need to be able to measure so that you can ensure that your organization is always improving. Early research can identify flaws in your service or areas where a product needs to be improved, by conducting regular market research it will identify if improvements are being made and, if positive, will in turn help motivate a development team.
Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few businesses invest sufficient resources to gather good intelligence that will help them improve business. Many may think that market research takes too much time and effort but that is just not the case anymore as through the power of the Internet online survey software is readily available and vital market research data can now be gathered in a quick, simple and cost effective manner.
