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How to do Market Research
Subject Line: How to do Market Research
The Write Market Release
Vol 2. Issue 10
How to do Market Research
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CONTENTS IN THIS ISSUE
1. Editor's Remarks
2. How to Write a Marketing Plan - Part II
a) What is Market Research?
b) How to Design a Survey
c) Tips on Web Survey Design
3. What's New at The Write Market
4. Get Your Ad in TWM's Release!
5. Administrative Information
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EDITOR'S REMARKS
Welcome Everyone!
We're going to make a few slight changes to the links you will
find throughout the newsletter.
Our list host program tells us that 11% of the people
subscribed to this newsletter are AOL users, so we thought
we'd make it a little easier on them by providing an AOL link
as well as the regular links we've always included. Any
feedback from AOL people would be helpful (are the links
working correctly, etc.)
Also, we want to be able to track our ads. We've found a
neat little program called LinkCounter:
http://www.linkcounter.com/
AOL Link
It's free! So we'll be tracking our links using their program.
For the rest of our tutorial, "How to Write a Marketing Plan"
we are going to provide a real-life example as we continue
developing a marketing plan for our book,
"My Promotion Journal: Search Engines and Directories."
For a limited time, if you fill out our survey, we're offering
our e-booklet for $1 off the regular price:
(This is your big chance to learn everything you need to know
about the basics of Search Engine Optimization
for under $6!)
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=84548
AOL Link
(above link is an example of the link counter tracking links.)
Next month stay tuned for the third part of our tutorial:
target market and unique selling proposition.
Write on,
Renee Kennedy
rkennedy@thewritemarket.com
________________________________________
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__________________________
WHAT IS MARKET RESEARCH?
Market research is discovering what people want, need, or believe.
It can also involve discovering how they act. Once that research
is complete you can use it to determine how to market your
specific product.
Here is the process:
A. Establish and Write Your Goals. What do you want
to know? What do you want to find out? Goals might involve
demographic information about your target market, the brands
that your target market currently use, their perceptions of
a particular product. Try to be specific when you write your
goals, it will make your data collection easier.
B. Collect Information with one or more of the following Research Methods -
1. Literature searches: review all relevant and accessible reading
material.
a) Use search engines to find e-books and articles related to your
industry and product. Here is an excellent article that will
show you how to research for your industry:
http://www.thewritemarket.com/articles/suelewis.htm
AOL Link
b) Visit your competitor's sites to see how they are marketing
their products using benefits and features.
c) Participate in discussion lists or online chats that center
around your industry and/or your product.
d) Subscribe to newsletters that discuss your industry.
e) Read newspapers for current information.
f) Read books for past information and to get a feel for trends.
2. Survey/Interview - the survey is probably the quickest and cheapest
method of research. It is ideal for small business. There are
many ways to conduct a survey and the next article will discuss
survey design and gathering techniques.
3. Observation - watching people without interacting with them.
Observation is monitoring people's habits without intrusive
methods. One application of this type of research would be the
bar code scanners at grocery stores. However, this model is
probably not as readily available to the small business as the
survey.
4. Experiment: generally the experiment must be restricted to a
laboratory because the researcher will need to manipulate one
variable at a time. The only way this can be done
with success is in a controlled environment. However, we will be
conducting "marketing experiments." We may try one method and
change one variable at a time to see if it will improve our sales.
More on this will be forthcoming as we try out various marketing
strategies.
C. Organize and Analyze Your Information
In any type of research situation, you want to have a methodical
process to collect and store information. When you have
chosen your research method, implemented your research,
and stored the information in an organized way,
you will see how you can use that information.
If you're doing a survey, or any type of "experiment" you may
want a statistic's calculator. Here is a link to a very good, free
calculator. It also explains statistical analysis with an excellent
tutorial on market research and survey design.
http://www.http://www.statpac.com/statcalc
AOL Link
Here's another free calculator that you don't have to download:
http://home.clara.net/sisa/
AOL Link
If you know nothing about statistics and
If you don't have the time to figure out statistics (and it might take you a
solid couple of weeks to figure it out) and
If you don't have the money to pay someone to do your statistical analysis,
Then we recommend that you use a "qualitative research methodology"
(qualitative means that you aren't going to reduce your
findings to numbers). In other words, you can still do market
research and learn important information about your target
without statistical analysis. For small business people, with more
limited resources, using a qualitative survey is the most efficient tool
to learn about target markets.
D. Make Conclusions
Write down the following:
1. Your goals - what you wanted to find out about your market.
2. The method that you used to find answers to your questions.
Why you chose that method.
3. The conclusions that you came up with after you did your market
research.
4. How these conclusions will influence the way you will promote your
product.
__________________
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________________________
HOW TO DESIGN A SURVEY
The survey can be a powerful tool to figure out what your market
needs and how you can market to them. Just the process of
developing a survey will help you learn more about your target market.
1. First establish the goals of your survey. What are you trying to find
out? Be very specific. Write them down.
EXAMPLE:
Here are a few of the goals for our survey:
a. How do people find our product web page?
b. Do these people own their own business?
c. Do they work for a small business or a large company?
d. What is the level of their Search Engine Optimization knowledge?
e. Where do these people hang out on the Internet?
f. Why don't they buy our product today?
2. Who will you ask? Who will be your sample?
EXAMPLE:
We are going to ask the following people to fill out our survey:
a. People that come to our home page
b. People that come to our product page
c. People that read our newsletter
d. We are also using ads in various e-zines to get the word out about
our survey.
3. What method of surveying will you use? Here are some choices from
most expensive to least expensive:
a. Personal Interview - face-to-face interviewing - sometimes
conducted in a mall or on the street.
b. Telephone - probably one of the most popular methods.
c. Mail - inexpensive, also there is no interference by an interviewer,
so there is less bias.
d. Web based - only use if your target population would be online.
EXAMPLE:
We are going to use a web based survey, because most of the selling of
our book will occur online. Also, the only people that would be interested
in our book would be people online.
4. Plan your research carefully, once you know who you're surveying and
the type of method you will use:
a. Develop a time line - how long it will take from designing the
survey to analyzing the data.
b. Do a cost estimate. You might break down cost by each
step involved.
EXAMPLE:
Our survey will costs us nothing but our own time.
Timeline:
Jan 1 - Jan 20: write survey
Jan 20 - Jan 30: run a pretest
Jan 31: rewrite what needs rewriting
Feb 1 to Feb 18: implement survey, send out ads in e-zines that will
run ads for free, put on web site home page and product page.
Feb 18 - Feb 28: analyze data and incorporate into marketing plan
5. Design the survey. Write the survey based on the method that you
have chosen (Number 3 above.)
6. Pretest. Pretesting will help you determine if the survey is easy
to understand, if people are able to fill it out, and other problems
that may occur. Rewrite the survey if you need to.
EXAMPLE:
We pretested our survey to about 15 people - friends and family,
that we were fairly sure would respond.
Side Note: we were going to skip the pretest, because it's a
little bit of a pain. DON'T SKIP IT. It actually told
us several things that were wrong with our survey.
7. Test. Do the actual survey. Collect the data and put it into
an organized format.
EXAMPLE:
Here is our survey - as long as you're going to check out our
survey - please fill it out!
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=84565
AOL Link
8. Analyze. If you're using quantifiable information you can
analyze with statistics. However, expect to spend some time
learning how to do statistics. If you're statistically challenged,
perhaps you want to develop a more qualitative survey. If so,
you will analyze using inferences and basic reasoning rather
than statistics.
Your goals will dictate your questions and the answers to those
questions will help you determine what you will do with
your marketing plan and the marketing strategies that you
choose to employ.
Next month, we will have the results from our survey and tell you
how they've influenced our marketing plan.
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TIPS ON WEB SURVEY DESIGN
The very basics:
1. Have a title.
2. State who you are (you may not want to state your company if you think
it will influence the answers).
3. Introduce the purpose of the survey. A few sentences to let your
sample know what you're doing this for.
4. There are three choices of survey types:
i. multiple choice (for results you can easily quantify, use this
type.)
"Where do you shop the most often for your prescriptions?
a. Walgreens
b. Rite Aid
c. Shop-N-Save
d. None of the above.
e. Don't know."
ii. open numeric - "How many employees do you have?" ______
iii. open text - "What is your occupation?" __________________
5. Keep your survey short and sweet. (This is especially important if you
are using the web.)
More Specifics:
1. Use basic vocabulary unless you are positive that your respondents
are well-educated. Do not use jargon or language that your sample
might not understand.
2. Begin with non-threatening questions. If you plan to use questions of a
sensitive nature, save them for the end of the survey. Have a privacy
statement if you intend to include sensitive questions.
3. Ask questions that are one-dimensional. Don't ask, "Do you like the
color and the shape?" You could ask separately, "Do you like the color?"
in another question, "Do you like the shape?"
4. Answers should leave no room for ambiguity. For instance,
"Where do you live?"
a. apartment
b. house
c. country
d. city
This would be difficult to answer because people might live in both a
house and the country.
5. Make sure you have a "not applicable" for each question that may
need it, this will eliminate frustration if respondents don't like any of
the choices. Use a "don't know" option for factual questions.
6. Consider the order of your questions. Transitions from one question
to the next should be smooth. Keep questions that have the same topic
or that use the same response format together.
7. Try not to branch your questions. That is, try not to make your
questions dependent from one to the next.
8. If using a multiple choice questionnaire, consider leaving space after
each question for people to make comments. With an online survey,
we recommend a text area for comments at the very end. Although,
perhaps this information is not quantifiable, you may gain valuable
insight from these responses.
9. Provide incentives for a properly completed questionnaire. For
instance, offer them a free gift or a reduced price on your product.
Make the incentive match the respondents. Also, perhaps try a
deadline.
10. Response Rate is a direct indicator of confidence level or the
reliability of a study. Doing a survey on the web is going to be hard to
measure your response rate.
Real Life Example
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=84565
AOL Link
As long as your going to check out our survey - please fill it out!
Also, check out this article by Dan Grossman on polling your visitors -
he gives you some links to survey scripts:
http://www.thewritemarket.com/articles/grossman1.htm
AOL Link
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WHAT'S NEW AT THE WRITE MARKET
Our Survey!
Fill out our survey and we'll give you $1.00 off
the e-book version of our new book:
My Promotion Journal: Search Engines and Directories
Go to the explanation of the book:
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=83006
AOL Link
Go directly to the survey:
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=84565
AOL Link
Our new tutorial will be available at:
http://www.thewritemarket.com/marketing-plan.shtml
AOL Link
Several new articles:
http://www.thewritemarket.com/articles.shtml
AOL Link
________________________
GET YOUR AD IN THIS EZINE
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Contact:
webmaster@thewritemarket.com
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