Success in today’s highly competitive business landscape means a company should have the ability to not only create high-quality, innovative products, but also know the preferences, choices, desires, and needs of their target audience. It also means the entrepreneur must set realistic targets for their business, maintain a competitive advantage, and create effective marketing strategies that appeal directly to customers.
Conducting market research provides you with the market data and insights you need to achieve all those things, paving the way for business growth and success. Many businesses deploy surveys when conducting market research, as they’re relatively inexpensive and more dependable when it comes to gathering extensive data from a target market.
A data-backed survey with effective survey translation (necessary for participants whose native language isn’t English) can provide crucial insights. Additionally, surveys are flexible and can be administered in many ways: online surveys, anonymous surveys, social media surveys, focus groups, and telephone surveys. With that said, here are five more reasons why you should start using surveys in your market research.
Test New Product Concepts
“It’s finger-lickin’ good.” “I’m lovin’ it.” “Open Happiness.” You’ve probably come across these impressive brand slogans by KFC, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola. These phrases capture the personality, positioning, and core values of the respective companies. And this is one of the reasons people keep choosing these brands.
What these brands have done is to first research and understand their target audience, then create taglines and campaigns that resonate with their target market. Surveys are incredibly useful when conducting demographic research, as they make it easy and quick to not only determine who your target market is but also test a new product concept or name idea, to understand the consumers’ desires, needs, and attitudes in relation to your competitors.
Through surveys, you can collect data that will help you identify issues that may have gone unnoticed and fine-tune your offering or refine your brand to make a more favorable impression on your audience.
Measure Brand Awareness
As a business, you’ve invested your efforts and resources to create a highly-quality product that means everything to you. You’re confident it’ll be well-received and you’re going to consistently hit your targets. That’s a good thing. However, this will remain a dream if you don’t take the time to find out what consumers think of your product.
With a brand awareness survey, you can gain valuable insights on what qualities customers and prospects associate with your brand, how well they know you, and what they think about your products or services. Your survey should focus on asking respondents what inspires them to keep buying from you, and how they feel about your brand compared to your competitors. This will help you figure out how effective your marketing campaigns have been and point out areas you can improve on.
Determine the Best Pricing Structure
Surveying consumers about how much they’ll be willing to spend on your new product and what they think about your competitors’ pricing can provide you with valuable data that will help you identify the best pricing structure for all your offers. Instead of relying on guesswork or having arbitrary criteria for how you price your products, you can always check with your survey data and make informed decisions.
Update Product Offerings Based on Data
However innovative or ‘disruptive’ your product is, the simple truth is that you won’t make a single sale if consumers believe it doesn’t solve any of their problems. And you’ll have a hard time persuading people that they actually need your product or service unless you have a deep understanding of what it is your target market wants.
Sending a product feedback survey to your customers, whether through a mobile survey, online survey, or focus group, can provide you with insights on what they look for when making a purchase decision, what changes you can make to improve your product, and what they like most about your competitors’ product offerings. Your goal should be to collect data that will inform future product updates, innovations, improvements, and ultimately, drive more revenue for your business.
Get Custom Customer Feedback
The best way to get answers on which companies to monitor, how to effectively reach your target audience, and why customers are moving to your rivals, is by reaching out directly to the consumers for feedback.
With an online social media survey, you can quickly and easily identify which social channels to focus on and how to serve and/or support your customers better on each channel. You don’t want to use a one-size-fits-all approach when marketing your products on social media channels. These channels can also be incredibly useful when you need customer feedback on their interests, motivations, habits, behavior, and more.
Additionally, you can use a customer satisfaction survey to gather feedback on whether your current customer base is happy or unhappy with your product or services.
