Online Market Research – The Key To Online Success
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Market Research – Tells You More Than You Would Think
If you conduct effective market research what are the things you can learn?
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 target your marketing and fine tune your product or service.
Know your target market – Who exactly are your existing customers and where do they live? What age group does your service or product appeal to? 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 organization and are you improving in the right areas?
Products and services – Do you have the products or services that people want? Do you represent value for money? How do your products and services compare to that of your competitors? Can you, do you, 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 enough good advice and assistance on hand? Do people find it easy to buy from you? Are your staff 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?
Do the right people understand your marketing message? Does the marketing material properly represent your brand? Do you use the right advertising channels? Are you reaching your target audience?
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.
The Importance of Doing Market Research
For any organization that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted market research is essential. Business decisions based on good market research can help minimise any risk and should pay dividends in the longer term. 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 asking your customers you no longer need to guess what your customers are thinking and you demonstrate to them that you are proactive when it comes to customer services and value their opinion.
- Market research helps you identify opportunities – If a new service is planned and you want to know the attitudes people have then market research can help, not only by evaluating the potential for the new idea, but also by identify the areas where a marketing message needs to be fine tuned.
- 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. Preliminary research may be able to identify problems in the service you intend to offer or in your product, regular market research will show if progress is being made and, if positive, will help motivate a team.
Market research brings considerable benefits and it is perhaps surprising how few organizations invest sufficient resources to enable them to gather good intelligence that will help them improve their 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.
How to Write Effective Surveys
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 twenty tips 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 survey title 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 make them feel that their investment is worthwhile.
3. Ensure that you do not make the survey any longer than it needs to be
Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Concentrate on the ‘need to know’ questions and minimise ‘nice to know’ information.
4. Use plain English, maintain consistency and avoid terminology, acronyms and asking questions that could result in ambiguous answers
Take care when wording a question. If a question can be interpreted in more ways than one then there is a real risk that any analysis of the survey data will be meaningless or at the very least misleading.
5. Avoid long questions
Try to use short sentences wherever possible. Long questions tend to cause respondents discomfort 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 athletics and football?’
7. Do not influence the answer
Avoid loading the question. ‘Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell tobacco to minors be prosecuted?’ is likely to have no value.
8. Make sure that the chosen answer format allows the respondent to answer the question being asked
Ensure that the respondent is able to answer how they really feel or they may be less inclined to complete the survey. As a last resort consider the benefit of including a “Don’t know”, “No comment” or similar response option.
9. While compiling your survey consider how you will want to analyse the results once the survey has been published
Appreciate that questions that allow for a free text open ended response, such as when asking the respondent for their comments, is likely to be difficult to score and/or summarised. Consider how the answers could be grouped. For example “Indicate your length of service?” – ‘less than 1 year’, ‘between 1 and 5 years’ and ‘more than 5′.
10. Ensure that the questionnaire flows
Group the questions into clear categories as this makes the task of completing the survey easier for the participants.
11. Target your respondents
In some cases 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 fit your target profile.
12. Provide a channel for your respondents to expand on their answers or make comments
Allowing the respondent 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 that for large sample collections free text open ended responses may prove difficult to analyze.
13. If you are conducting a confidential survey ensure that your pledge for confidentiality is upheld
If you have guaranteed the respondents that the survey is confidential ensure that the individual data is not to be shared with anyone and the information is not going to be used for any other purpose. Confidentiality must be maintained at all times and any contact information destroyed once the survey has finished.
14. Consider the advantages and disadvantages of allowing respondents to be anonymous or identifiable
If your respondents are to be anonymous then appreciate that you will be unable to follow up or match “pre” or “post” surveys. Allowing people to remain anonymous can however have advantages for example it would allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.
15. Carefully consider the best response format
Being consistent with the format used for responses is good practice. When creating your survey keep in mind that when analysing the data single selection radio buttons are easier to analyse than multiple selection check boxes. Do not use a check box format if a radio response format would do.
16. Give the respondent an estimate as to how much time the survey will take to complete
Respondent drop out can increase if there is no end in sight to the survey questions. It is good practice 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 the 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. Trial 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 practical get a colleague to check 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 prize draw or reward.
For more information please visit Survey Galaxy