Every marketing plan needs to involve some level of marketing research to validate any marketing initiative and to understand what your customers really want. But what are the best research methods to use to suit your specific business needs?
Before I start, it should be noted that not all marketing research should only occur in big organisations with significant budgets. There are number of different research methods which small business can use to analyse their market.
By keeping your research methods as simple and focused as possible will help you collect, sort and analyse information without getting bogged down or disheartened.
Primary Research
For the purpose of this blog, I’m only going to focus on primary research as I’m assuming most people know how to obtain secondary research and information which is readily available from places such as trade unions, libraries, government authorities and departments, e.g. Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)
The four most common methods used to collect primary data include:
Surveys or questionnaires
Focus Groups
Personal Interviews
Observation
Surveys
Every small business can reap the benefits from using small-scale surveys. SurveyMonkey.com is a smart tool to create and publish custom surveys, allowing the user to view results graphically and in real-time. You should be surveying your customers at least every six months, or perhaps the next you send out an invoice. The cost to sign up is very cheap, so it’s worth a look.
But there is a definite art to designing good questionnaires. It is not the best method if the information you require is complex, if you need a lengthy response, or you are vague about the information you want.
So here are my top 10 common guidelines when developing the perfect survey:
1. Always place your contact details at the top of the first page.
2. Keep the layout simple, and break the page into sections where necessary
3. Ask a maximum of 20 questions. No one likes to dedicate more than a few minutes of their time these days. If you need more information, think about developing two questionnaires and distributing them separately.
4. Make sure wording is clear, simple and concise.
5. Avoid asking two questions in one. i.e. Do you like the look and feel of the TX1000 broom stick? I may like the look, but it might feel awful. Hence it would be very difficult to answer this question properly.
6. Do not give a survey to your friends and family to complete. They will never give you an honest response!
7. If you’re begging the question, you will always get the answer you want, not the answer you require.
For example, I knew a lady who wanted to start-up a new designer jewellery label whose main selling feature was that all her products were never made in offshore sweatshops, but only by certified and ethical jewellery makers. The survey question posed was, ‘How important is Ethical/Fair Trade to you generally speaking?’. Now of course I selected ‘Extremely Important’ – the top choice in the sliding scale.
I’m sure every person would like to think their jewellery, or any other product for that matter isn’t made in a sweat shop environment. But truth be told, buying behaviours are very different to consumer attitudes. This is something that’s very hard to identify in a survey.
Perhaps if the lady wrote the following question. It may have provided a more truthful response:
Please rank in order from 1 (Most important) to 5 (least important) what product characteristics are the most important to you when purchasing jewellery:
Style
Colour
Price
Quality
Design Label
Was it ethically made?
You could certainly drill down with these questions further. But essentially you may find that some consumers will find a style and a price that best suites their requirements. Whether it was made under Fair Trade practices may become irrelevant during the purchasing process.
8. Always ask at least one open-ended question. This allows the person taking the survey to provide some insight into their own personal buying motives or challenges.
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