Conducting a market survey is key to truly understanding your potential customer base and gauging demand for your product or service. By asking the right questions to the right demographics, you can gain invaluable insight to help shape your marketing efforts. Follow this step-by-step guide to create and deploy an effective market survey.
Define your objectives. Start by outlining what you want to learn or achieve with this survey. Do you want to validate a new product concept? Gauge pricing acceptability? Understand brand awareness? Get a demographic snapshot? Nail down your goals first so you can craft targeted questions.
Identify your target respondents. Who do you want to take this survey to yield the most useful data? Existing customers? Geographic markets? Industry professionals? Age groups and genders? Defining the key profile factors ensures you solicits feedback from those with relevant experience.
Choose your survey method(s). Surveys can be conducted via phone interviews, paper questionnaires, website pop-ups, email campaigns, social media, and more. Consider reach, response rates, administration time, costs and brands. A multi-mode approach may be best.
Formulate your survey questions. With goals and audiences defined, create a mix of quantitative answer style questions (multiple choice, rating scales) to easily track metrics around key focus areas. Add in some open-ended qualitative questions for more context and color.
Refine question types and flows through thorough pre-testing and adjustment. Check that questions are clear, concise, unbiased, non-leading, and cover all information objectives without making the survey too long. Refine after initial pre-tests.
Deploy the survey. Publish the survey via web links and QR codes, send it out through email distribution channels, make phone calls, and leverage social media connections to qualified prospects. Offer incentives to boost response rates.
Analyze and interpret responses. As completed survey results come in, compile quantitative data and metrics around spending habits, preferences, brand reception and so on. Qualitative comments should be coded into topics and themes to derive insights.
Compile compelling reports. Showcase key data chart visualizations around target metrics. Integrate powerful anonymous respondent quotes that emphasize major qualitative findings from the open-ended questions and commentary.
Monitor market changes via follow-up. Check back at least annually via shorter pulse surveys to monitor shifts that may impact your business strategy over time.
Define your objectives. Start by outlining what you want to learn or achieve with this survey. Do you want to validate a new product concept? Gauge pricing acceptability? Understand brand awareness? Get a demographic snapshot? Nail down your goals first so you can craft targeted questions.
Identify your target respondents. Who do you want to take this survey to yield the most useful data? Existing customers? Geographic markets? Industry professionals? Age groups and genders? Defining the key profile factors ensures you solicits feedback from those with relevant experience.
Choose your survey method(s). Surveys can be conducted via phone interviews, paper questionnaires, website pop-ups, email campaigns, social media, and more. Consider reach, response rates, administration time, costs and brands. A multi-mode approach may be best.
Formulate your survey questions. With goals and audiences defined, create a mix of quantitative answer style questions (multiple choice, rating scales) to easily track metrics around key focus areas. Add in some open-ended qualitative questions for more context and color.
Refine question types and flows through thorough pre-testing and adjustment. Check that questions are clear, concise, unbiased, non-leading, and cover all information objectives without making the survey too long. Refine after initial pre-tests.
Deploy the survey. Publish the survey via web links and QR codes, send it out through email distribution channels, make phone calls, and leverage social media connections to qualified prospects. Offer incentives to boost response rates.
Analyze and interpret responses. As completed survey results come in, compile quantitative data and metrics around spending habits, preferences, brand reception and so on. Qualitative comments should be coded into topics and themes to derive insights.
Compile compelling reports. Showcase key data chart visualizations around target metrics. Integrate powerful anonymous respondent quotes that emphasize major qualitative findings from the open-ended questions and commentary.
Monitor market changes via follow-up. Check back at least annually via shorter pulse surveys to monitor shifts that may impact your business strategy over time.
