I’m a big fan of market research. Of course, everybody in marketing will say they support market research. Ask the question, “Should we do more market research?” and I guarantee the answer will be a resounding “Yes!” The problem is that many people think of market research only in terms of major projects that can be very expensive and time-consuming, and we can never seem to make it a priority over the million other activities we have going on.
I’ve been involved with these “big” market research projects, where we’ve spent over $100,000 and outsourced a great deal of the effort, and they can be extremely valuable. To me though, the more exciting type of market research involves the small things that you can do to incorporate research into your daily work routine. And all you need are some customer data and a web survey tool.
For the web survey tool, there are many options out there. A few that I’ve personally used include SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang and Qualtrics. Most tools offer a free version limited by number of questions or number of responses. However, if you’re going to be doing regular research it’s well worth the added capabilities you get with the paid versions. SurveyMonkey for example charges anywhere from $17 per month up to $65 per month, depending on how much customization and which advanced features you need.
All the tools I’ve tried are easy to use, both for creating surveys and doing simple analysis of the results. For more complex analysis you can export the data into a spreadsheet and use Excel pivot tables.
Armed with these simple and inexpensive tools, here are a few easy research projects you can do:
Customer satisfaction surveys. Ask a random sample of your customers how they perceive the experience of buying and using your products. Doing this once is good, but the real value comes when you do it on a regular basis and track the trends over time. Be careful though! Any minor change in your survey, from the way you target respondents to the way that a question is worded, can cause the results to be skewed and inaccurate when comparing one survey to the next.
Evaluation follow-up surveys. Some time after prospects try your product, ask them to complete a survey about their evaluation experience. Ask them what they decided to do and why. Did they end up purchasing your product or did they go with a competitor? You can get some great feedback both about your products and your marketing and sales processes.
Community surveys. This is one of my favorites. It requires having some sort of relationship with the leaders of the online communities for your industry. These are the guys or gals that run the independent web sites, user forums, email lists, etc. Create a general survey asking whatever you’d like to learn from the market. What products do you use? What are your biggest issues? What kind of processes do you use? Then, ask the community leaders to help you promote the survey, offering in exchange to provide them with a summary of the survey results. I’ve never been turned down or asked to pay for this type of access to the community.
Trade show survey. If you’re spending money to exhibit at a conference, why not take advantage of the opportunity and run a survey in your booth? Ask some general questions about a hot industry topic and use the results to generate content and PR. Offer a prize drawing that will motivate people to spend 5 minutes completing a survey in your booth, either on paper or on an iPad using a tool like Polldaddy. Here is an example of such a survey we ran on desktop virtualization at the Citrix Synergy conference. We used the results to create a white paper, infographic and blog post, all of which helped drive our message and lead gen efforts, spending no more than we had already planned for the conference.
Independent satisfaction survey. I wrote in detail about this in a previous post. This one requires a little money, but may be well worth it. At Wise, we had a strong suspicion that our customers were happier than those of our arch-rival InstallShield. So we hired TechRepublic, which is an online industry publication, to do an independent satisfaction survey. They targeted their own list and confirmed our suspicions, finding that 96% of our customers were satisfied overall vs. 71% for InstallShield. This survey cost us around $10,000, but we were able to heavily market these results as a survey conducted by an independent and respected third-party.
Of course, that’s just a start. I’d love to hear about any additional ideas that you’ve found to be successful.
One more important tip: When you do these surveys, ask a question like, “May a product manager follow up with you to further discuss your responses?” Make it clear that this wouldn’t be a sales call, but purely for market research purposes, and offer some type of incentive like a $25 amazon.com gift certificate. This becomes a great source for setting up market interviews, which is another critical type of research you should incorporate into your routine.
I’ll go into more detail on some of these in future articles. In the meantime, I hope this provides some ideas on doing market research that’s realistic and inexpensive.
