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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 product or service 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 company’s products and services match up to that of your competitors? If you have a product can you, do you, should you deliver directly to your customer?

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 sufficient advice and assistance on hand? Do people find it easy to buy from you? Are all your staff properly trained, helpful, knowledgeable and available?

Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. Which of the marketing channels that are available to you are effective and which ones are proving ineffective?

Is the marketing message understood? Does your marketing material accurately represent your brand? Do you use the right promotion 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.

For any business that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted market research is essential. 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 launch a new product and want to know how people will react then market research will help, not only in predicting how well the product will be received, but also by testing the marketing message to see if that needs to be adjusted.
• Market research will minimise risk - Market research can identifying what is needed for a new service and product and ensure that the development of a product matches demand.
• Market research creates benchmarks and helps you measure your progress - By establishing a benchmark you then have a useful reference to allow you to measure your progress – If you do not measure you will not be able to properly gauge how well your business is performing. 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 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.

How to create a survey using Survey Galaxy

Designing surveys is easy; or is it? The reality is that writing surveys is easy but writing surveys that will be effective is a little bit more difficult. The following are twenty tips that if followed will help you with your survey questionnaire design and help you write effective surveys.

1. What is the survey’s purpose?

Surveys are conducted for many reasons. 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 designing a survey do not lose sight of its purpose.

2. Give the survey a good title

The survey title is key and an opportunity to instantly summarise a survey’s objective and grab the attention of invited respondents. Respondents are going to invest time in completing the survey so make them feel that their investment is worthwhile.

3. Don’t make the survey any longer than it needs to be

Every question that is 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, avoid jargon and acronyms and don’t ask questions that may result in ambiguous answers

Be careful when wording the question. If a question can be interpreted in more ways than one then there is a risk that any analysis of the survey results will be worthless or at the very least suspect.

5. Avoid long questions

Use succinct 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 tennis and golf?’

7. Avoid influencing the answer

Avoid loading the question. ‘Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell tobacco to minors be prosecuted?’ is likely to have no value.

8. Ensure that the answer format used allows the respondent to answer the question being asked

Ensure that the respondent is able to answer how they really feel or they may abandon the survey. As a last resort consider the benefit of including a “Can’t say”, “Don’t know” or similar response option.

9. At the same time that you compile the survey consider, when the survey is complete, how the compiled data is going be analysed

If a question is asked that allows a free text open ended response appreciate that such information is likely to be difficult to score and/or summarised. Consider grouping answers. For example “Indicate your length of service?” - ‘less than 3 year’, ‘between 3 and 8 years’ and ‘more than 8′.

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

You may want to target a specific group, in others a cross section. If you can’t easily control the respondents consider including questions/answers that will allow you to filter out respondents that don’t match your target profile.

12. Allow the respondent to expand or make comments

By allowing respondents to make additional comments you will increase their satisfaction level and the comments will also give valuable feedback on the specific questions and/or the survey as a whole. Remember that for large sample collections that free text open ended responses may be difficult to analyse.

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 and any identifying information deleted 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 appreciate that you will be unable to follow up or match “pre” or “post” surveys. There are advantages to allowing people to remain anonymous for example it would allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.

15. Consideration carefully 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 radio buttons are easier to analyse than check boxes that offer the respondent multiple responses. If a radio response can be used do not use a check box.

16. Give the respondent an estimate as to how much time the survey will take

Respondent drop out can occur if the survey appears to be a stream of never ending 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 small pilot survey to check for questions that are ambiguous or confusing and to ensure that the survey is aesthetically pleasing.

19. Before publishing the survey check the survey several times

Check more than once that the survey is grammatically correct and makes sense. If possible get someone else to proof read the survey before you publish, if you are unable to do this then take a break before checking again.

20. Thank your respondents

To complete surveys respondents have to devote their time and should be thanked 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.

Getting started is easy and there are many survey software websites to choose from.