Steps to do market survey for new business involve asking large groups of people questions on a specific topic or issue. The process of asking people questions about an issue of interest is survey.
Market survey is a part of what you do when you are carrying out marketing research.
You can do survey in many ways such as administering questionnaires, face to face and email interviews, and telephone interviews. All these methods have advantages and disadvantages.
This article shall focus on steps to do market survey, and those steps shall show why you carry out market survey for a new business.
You can follow these steps to reach the right consumers for your products or services.
1) What is the Aim of a Market Survey?
As you plan for a market survey, you should have a specific goal for embarking on that survey.
There are three major reasons why people carry out market research. They are to find whom it will compete with, find out whether there is a market for their business idea, and discover customers who are willing to pay for the solution the company provides.
However, market survey focuses on an aspect of these three goals of market research at a time. Market survey studies the market and suggests ways a new business can carry out definite goals of the company in a simple way and make profit.
As a new business your aim could be to test if the market will accept the product or service you want to sell.
If you have already launched a product, it could be to test how the market perceives your product, whether they want something different or want improvement of the product.
Without a goal a market survey will be pointless, as it will do nothing useful.
2) Define the Characteristics of that Market
Steps to do market survey for new business need preparation to do them well and get good results.
To help you prepare for the market survey and get correct information from the respondents, find out the make-up of the population, natural features of the area, and the size of the market.
For example, your market survey should show specific information about the habit of your potential customers, what they spend money on, how much they earn and how many times they buy similar products or services available in the market, their sex, employment history, age range, etc.
3) Pick a Sample Respondent Group from the Market
To collect the information you need, pick sample size from a large group of people in the market that represents potential consumers of your product or service and those of your competitors. To cut the margin of error, survey a reasonable number of the sample population.
Prepare close ended questions such as multiple choice questions, questions asking respondents to rank something and rating scale questions.
Add open-ended questions at the end of the list for respondents to give opinions and make suggestions for changes to a product or service.
The type of information in your pool of questions could range from what kind of products or services they buy and why, if they were enjoying the products, if not what were the problems they faced and the changes they would love to see.
Other questions are, how they learnt about those services or products, ask for suggestions on ways to improve product, ask them to rate those products or services on a scale of 1 to 5, or why some customers would buy from a company and others won’t, or ask respondents to rank the service of two restaurants selling similar food, etc.
4) Selecting Time, Place and Survey Method
One of the steps to do market survey for new business is to find out the place you can reach respondents in a given market, and the type of survey method to use – questionnaire or interview for different environments.
Some of the ways you can reach potential survey respondents is by telephone, email, and online survey. You could meet respondents on the street, inside a market or in a shop and interview them.
Pick a suitable time, place and survey method for collection of facts. For example, you could put yourself at the exit of a shopping mall to ask questions about the shopping experience of people coming out from the mall and record the response on your GSM telephone.
5) Choose the Right Market Survey Methodology
Steps to do market survey for new business involve picking the right survey method to use. The options are questionnaires, face to face interviews, online surveys, and email and telephone interviews.
For example, you could write simple close-ended questions in Questionnaires and send to people by emails or administer questions face to face. One of the disadvantages of using questionnaires is the cost of printing them.
Secondly, questionnaires limit respondents from giving their opinions. However, using interviews allows the interviewer to explore open-ended questions fully, but the problem is that it wastes time.
Using emails is a smart and easy way to do market survey because it is cheap, and the recipients of your market survey email are people who are in your sample size of respondents.
You could also get telephone numbers of selected respondents and conduct the market survey by telephone. However, this method is not only difficult and costly, but the response rate is unpredictable.
6) Use Online Survey Tools
Additional steps to do market survey for new business include online survey.
This method is easy and cheap to do. Find reputable free online survey platforms such as Survey Gizmo, Survey Monkey, Survey Planet, Google and Type forms to carry out your market survey.
Use any of this free survey tools to create online surveys, get quick feedback and analyze results for use in your marketing promotion.
Some of these online survey websites also offer market survey services for a fair fee if you have the money to pay for one. You can give any of them your brief and they will do a good job provided your sample size has computer skills.
7) Carry out the Market Survey
This is the second to the last steps to do market survey for new business.
Carry out the survey using directions below as a guide to get responses and manage results. Also, make sure you focus on one problem only to avoid ambiguity and reach the goal of the market survey.
Before you start the real market survey, write short simple and direct questions for a test survey among your family, friends and co workers and appraise results to prepare for the real survey.
Pick a large sample population representing potential consumers of your new business for correct responses. Select this specific group of people or sample size for the survey you want to conduct based on their age, sex, employment, education and marital status.
A sample population enables you to focus your questions to get valid results from respondents you are targeting.
Before you start the real survey, confirm the accuracy of the questionnaires or electronic forms for collecting answers of respondents, pick the time and place suitable for you and your respondents to carry out the survey, and ask simple questions that they can answer in five minutes or less.
To reduce deliberate misleading responses, select the sample size you trust will supply impartial answers. Also, write survey questions that you can easily analyze.
Next, run the same survey in different places to get better results and even give the same survey, to different sample size in the same way to verify authenticity of first results.
8) Analyze and Produce Report
After carrying out the market survey, compile the facts to separate good responses from half and null responses, put numbers in a table, use graph and charts to analyze the results and then write a summary of your findings in a report.
Analyze the open-ended questionnaires to check and extract vital information out of their answers.
You could also use computer to analyze the results and generate final report. However, make sure you can understand and apply findings to your new business, or get professionals to help you.
Conclusion
Steps to do market survey for new business is a good way to find out the kind of product or service to introduce, the size of the opportunities in the market, what influences buyers decisions, and how to serve buyers to make them buy every time.
The best people to answer all those questions are the potential customers so asking them these questions, are the keys for lasting patronage and profitability for that new business.
This invaluable information is now in your hands so use them to launch a market survey to gather useful information for your new business.
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