Market research and customer surveys are essential for businesses seeking to understand their target audience, identify market trends, and drive sales growth.
They are vital in building a formidable business that attracts new customers and retains them. Understanding the market is essential for adapting to ever-changing consumer behavior and economic trends.
What is market research?
A business is a transactional exchange that involves the sale of a solution to a problem. Market research can help you understand the general market to identify your targeted audience and how best to reach them. It also helps you understand your competitors, because every business has direct and indirect competitors.
There are different market research projects that a business can conduct based on what they aim to achieve:
- Brand research
- Competitor research
- Usability testing
- Product development
- Consumer research
- Customer segmentation research
- Marketing campaign and promotion evaluation
Understanding customer surveys
Customer surveys are powerful tools for businesses to gather consumer feedback. By asking targeted questions, they help companies assess customer satisfaction, preferences, pain points, and expectations.
Despite being an aged practice of many companies, only a few still maximize its potential, if they conduct it at all. With the recent innovations in testing, businesses can now gather comprehensive insights that can be used to enhance their products and services and, at the same time, improve customer retention.
Broadly, customer satisfaction surveys can be divided into four categories:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): The survey asks respondents to rate a statement on a scale of 0-10.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): It is an on-the-spot test that asks for user feedback immediately after using a service. It usually requests a response as a star rating.
- Customer Effort Score (CES): It measures the effort expended by customers in using your service. It typically asks for a response in the form of an emotional emoji.
- Product-Market Fit (PMF): The survey is aimed at determining your product’s efficiency in solving customers’ problems. The responses are usually requested in the form of emotions, with options like very disappointed and not disappointed.
Boosting sales with market research and customer surveys
Only when done right can market research and customer surveys help boost your company’s sales.
Clear objectives
Identify and be specific about what you aim to achieve with your market research and customer surveys.
Use this to carefully select the kind of questions you need to ask to make informed decisions that will support sales and marketing strategies.
Some common objectives include understanding the needs and wants of the targeted audience and identifying the cause of sales decline.
Use appropriate research methods
Even though there are different research methods available for market research and customer surveys, not all will suit your objectives.
Sometimes, you might need to combine more than two methods to get the information you need to boost your sales.
The common research methods include:
Surveys
Surveys can be conducted via phone, mail, online, or in person. Use the delivery channel most used by your targeted audience. Phone surveys have the highest response rate but can be expensive. Online surveys are easy to distribute and analyze but may have lower response rates if not well deployed. Mail surveys, however, can be used to reach a wider audience but may also have low response rates. In-person is great for surveys where you need to observe and get real-time feedback from customers as they use your product or service. This might be people your team encounters in high-traffic areas.
Focus groups
Individuals who represent the consumer demographic are gathered and asked questions. Since they represent a larger group of people, the in-depth discussions with this small group of participants may provide insight into what your target audience wants in a company or a product.
Interviews
This combines the elements of focus groups and in-person interviews. For qualitative responses, researchers will often encourage the respondents to give in-depth answers to questions. While there might be a pre-written set of questions before the interview, the interviewer must be able to instantly come up with questions not on the list, especially as a follow-up to a respondent’s answer.
Social media listening
Social media plays a significant role in today’s digital business world. Consumers usually share their opinions about products and companies on social media. Monitor online conversations and sentiments related to your brand or industry.
In this way, you may be able to gather data about the market assessment of your brand, its strengths, weaknesses, and potential areas of improvement.
Develop a concise and easy-to-understand questionnaire
While it is understandable you need information to boost your sales, avoid overwhelming respondents with lengthy questions.
Ensure the questions are easy to read and understand. Before distributing them, try it out on a small sample to identify any issues.
Incentivize participation
Your survey is only useful if you get enough respondents to provide answers. Incentivizing your questionnaires can increase the number of respondents. It can also encourage honest feedback, as you will more likely be able to deduce more information from a large pool of responses than a scanty one.
The incentive can be monetary, such as cash, checks, coupons, and gift cards, or non-monetary, like pens and notebooks.
Target the right audience
The data gathered will only give meaningful information and impactful results if provided by the right demography. Identify your ideal customers and divide them into smaller and more manageable groups to decide on the best research method for them.
You can also utilize available customer data to refine your targeting.
Analyze and interpret data
There are two types of data you will most likely collect ― quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative data are usually numerical, such as responses to questions that ask for rating a statement on a scale of 1-10. Qualitative data can help unveil the why behind the qualitative.
Clean your data by removing low-quality and duplicate data. Analyze the quantitative data by creating charts and graphs to make your findings more understandable.
Leverage software to compile the data and analyze survey results. Extract key insights and implement recommendations that can boost your business sales.
