What will conducting effective market research teach you?

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? What age group does your service or product appeal to? 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? Do you represent 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 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 enough good advice and assistance on hand? Do you make it easy for your customers to buy? Are all your staff properly trained, knowledgeable, helpful and available?

Marketing – Is your marketing reaching the right people and is the marketing message clear and effective. What marketing channels are available to you, which ones should you focus on and which, if any, should you drop?

Is your marketing message understood? Does your marketing correctly represent your brand? Do you advertise through the right 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.

Market research is an essential part of any business that wants to offer products or services that are focused and well targeted. Business decisions based on 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 the guesswork is taken 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 – You need to be able to measure so that you can ensure that your organization is always improving. Early research can identify where improvements need to be made to a new service or where there are flaws in a product, 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 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.

With the morning sun shining bright you are sitting in your office. With a cup of hot coffee by your side and memories of your last holiday still fresh in your mind, even if you say so yourself, today at least, life is sweet.

You take a sip of new blend coffee and then feel a rush of cool air and a movement catches the corner of your eye. As if from nowhere there is now an impeccably dressed stranger sitting in the chair opposite. Sure you’re surprised; you didn’t hear anyone knock and just as you are about to say something he begins in a calm and measured voice.

‘The deal is this’

‘I am going to advertise your product on a billboard at the busiest junctions in every city of the world.’

‘I will be able to tell you how many people see the advertisement, their nationality, age and gender.’

‘I will tell you what they think of your product and in many cases I will give you their contact details. While they are reading the billboard I will make it possible for them to view your website and, if they feel the urge, make a purchase.’

‘I will have all this all set up in just a couple of days and it will cost you less than what you would normally pay for a small advertisement in your typical trade journal.’

He pauses momentarily. ‘Interested?’

Now you might think that such an offer was too good to be true, you might think that you are going to wake up soon or maybe that it really is time to get a lock on that office door.

But let’s just take time to reflect. If you are still reading this I am that man who has come from nowhere and offered you a deal.

The advertising site is on the Internet and the billboard I’m offering is the much underrated online survey.

Stop for a second and start to associate an online survey not with ‘market research’ but with ‘marketing’. Not any type of marketing but ‘Marketing’ with a capital ‘M’ and in flashing neon lights. Marketing that is direct, effective, low cost and quick.

You can advertise a published online survey on a website, or via email and like a billboard by the side of a major road junction, your message will appear in front of people. Unlike billboards where it has to be estimated as to the number of people actually see an advert, the online survey records the number of times a survey is started.

Surveys can ask demographic questions such as gender, age and nationality and in doing so you are obtaining metrics about the effectiveness of your promotion and are interacting with the respondent on a one-on-one level.

Unlike a billboard where the message is often subliminal, or maybe just trying to achieve brand awareness, with an online survey you have the opportunity to connect with the public to find out what they really think about your product, how it relates to them, how it is perceived.

Using an online survey website it takes only minutes and hours to create a survey and using the power of the Internet an online survey can reach hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis.

Throw in a prize as an incentive for people to complete the survey, maybe some Pay Per Click advertising to capture an even wider, or more focused audience and you are still talking low cost effective marketing.

‘Tell me then. Is it a deal?’