For any business 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 consulting with the customer you not only show them that you care but the guesswork is taken out of customer services.
• 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 - Unless you 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.

Considering the benefits that market research will bring to any organization 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.

By conducting effective market research what 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 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 group? Do you know who your potential customers are and where 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? Does your business represent value for money? How do your company’s products and services match up 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 you make it easy for people to buy from you? Are all your employees properly trained, knowledgeable, helpful 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 the marketing message understood? Does your marketing correctly represent your brand? Are the right channels being used to advertise? 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.

How to create a survey using Survey Galaxy

Writing surveys is easy; or is it? The truth 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 with your survey questionnaire design and help you write effective surveys.

1. What is the purpose of the survey?

Questionnaires are conducted for many reasons. By correctly phrasing the questions and structuring the answers surveys can be used in many ways and for a variety of reasons. When compiling a survey don't lose sight of the survey's 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 are going to invest time in completing the survey so make them feel that their investment is worthwhile.

3. Try to keep the survey as short as possible

Every question asked should be asked for a reason. Minimize the questions providing you with 'nice to know' information and concentrate instead on the 'need to know' questions.

4. Use plain English, maintain consistency and avoid jargon, acronyms and asking questions that could result in ambiguous answers

Care must be taken in wording a question. Ambiguous questions run the risk that any analysis of the resulting survey data will be worthless or at the very least suspect.

5. Don't have long questions

Try to use concise sentences wherever possible. Long questions can cause a respondent to lose concentration and lead to them abandoning the survey.

6. Ask one question at a time

Avoid confusing the respondent with a question like 'Do you like tennis and football?'

7. Avoid influencing the answer

It is important to avoid loading the question. 'Should irresponsible shop keepers who sell alcohol to children be prosecuted?' is unlikely to have any value.

8. Make sure that the chosen answer format 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", "Don't know" or similar response option.

9. While you are compiling your survey consider how the survey results are going to be analysed when the survey is complete

When asking questions that allow for a free text open ended response, such as when asking the respondent for their comments, 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 1 year', 'between 1 and 3 years' and 'more than 3'.

10. Try and ensure that the questionnaire flows

When asking questions group the questions into clear categories as this makes the task of completing the survey easier for the participants.

11. Target your respondents

Sometimes you will 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 on their answer 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 that free text open ended responses may be difficult to analyze.

13. If the survey you are conducting is to be confidential ensure that you honour your pledge

If you have assured respondents that the survey is to be confidential you need to ensure that the collated data is not shared with anyone or used for any other purpose. Confidentiality must be maintained at all times and any identifying information destroyed once the survey has finished.

14. Consider the benefits 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 or match "pre" or "post" surveys. In some cases allowing people to remain anonymous will however allow people to respond without possible peer pressure.

15. Carefully consider what the best response format will be

Maintaining a consistency in the format used for responses is good practice. Keep in mind that when analyzing the data radio buttons are easier to analyze than check boxes that offer the respondent multiple responses. If a radio response format can be used do not use a check box format.

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

If the survey appears to be a stream of never ending questions then respondent drop out can occur. 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. Advise the respondents of the survey end date

Try and 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 the survey as a trial 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 the respondents

To complete surveys respondents will need to invest their time and therefore should be thanked either at the end of completing the survey or in a follow up letter. You may even want to provide an incentive such as entry into a prize draw or a reward.

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