Posts Tagged ‘customer’
Market Research – The Benefits
What are the things you can learn by conducting 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 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, 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 be it in the form of notices, leaflets or human assistance? Do you make it easy for people 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. Which are the most effective marketing channels?
Do people correctly understand your marketing message? Does the marketing material properly 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 Important
For any organization that wants to offer products or services that are highly focused and well targeted market research is important. 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 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 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. 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.
Easy and Cost Effective Marketing
It’s a sunny morning and you’re sitting in your office. With a cup of hot coffee by your side and memories of the weekend’s activities still fresh in your mind, you feel relaxed and think, today at least, life is sweet.
You take a sip of your morning coffee and then feel a breeze of cool air and from the corner of your eye a movement. You blink to find an impeccably dressed stranger now sitting in the chair opposite. You are surprised; you didn’t hear anyone knock and just as you are about to ask who he is he begins to speak in what can only be described as a calm and reassuring voice.
‘The deal is this’
‘I am going to display your product on a billboard at each of the world’s cities busiest junctions.’
‘I will be able to tell you how many people see the advertisement, their age, nationality and gender.’
‘I will tell you exactly what they think of your product and can even give you their contact details. While they are looking at the billboard I will allow them to view your website and even make a purchase if they feel the urge.’
‘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 stops for just a second. ‘Interested?’
Now you might think that you should beware of offers that sound too good to be true, that you are going to wake up soon or maybe that you really should get a lock for that office door.
But let us just take a minute. If you are still reading this well 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 humble online survey.
Stop for one moment and start to associate an online survey not with ‘market research’ but with ‘marketing’. And not any type of marketing this is ‘Marketing’ with a very large capital ‘M’ and in flashing neon lights. Marketing that is quick, direct, effective and low cost.
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. The number of people that see a billboard can only be estimated where as the number of people that start an online survey is a verifiable number.
Online surveys can ask demographic questions such as age, gender and nationality and in doing so allows you to collate metrics about the effectiveness of your promotion and confirm that you are interacting with the target respondent on a one-on-one level.
Unlike billboards where the message is often subliminal, or maybe just trying to achieve brand awareness, with online surveys 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.
Even if you throw in a prize as an incentive for people to complete the survey, maybe invest in some Pay Per Click advertising to capture a wider, or more focused, audience you are still talking low cost effective marketing.
‘So,. Is it a deal?’
