Collect data that will show you if the market is prepared for your product. Find out the characteristics and specific needs of your target group, meet them and succeed!
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You have come up with a break through. Your brand new idea is evolving in your head, then in meetings with your colleagues and it is pretty much growing into a business strategy. You have fingers crossed that this idea/business strategy/new product will meet huge demand on the market. But even if all your colleagues have fingers crossed, it won’t give you the certainty or green light to open the gates of your financial sources, invest into development, production and marketing of this new product. If you don’t have the certainty, you run the risk of your project being bypassed by demand. Well, nobody wants that. Do you ask how you get certainty that the market is ready for your product? The answer is through market research.
By conducting market research you try to find out the buying potential of the coveted market. You analyze the market, segment and target the audience, stalk your competitors, observe pricing trends and simply try to gain data that will show you whether to try to penetrate the market or not.
We are opening quite a huge topic, as there are so many ways to approach market research. A market research of a small local company will differentiate from a market research conducted on demand of a global corporation. Methods, financial sources, people involved, time consumption… all of this depends on what the most suitable solution for every company is.
In this article, you will learn how much of your market research can be handled with an online survey. We will go through things that you might want to achieve by the market research and show how you can achieve those things by using an online survey. You will get concrete tips on suitable market research questions and find out how market research can help you evaluate a market opportunity.
You need to uncover if there are needs that will be fulfilled by your product. These needs can be fulfilled by one of the features of your product and it will determine your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). It can be the approach of your company to modern trends (sustainability, CSR, bio ingredients, fast delivery, perfect customer support, timeless design, better automatization). The challenge is to find out what the market calls for. The following questions serve as inspiration for you as every new product is very specific. Feel free to modify these questions.
Some people are more price sensitive, some less. Some people see 100 $ on a price tag and say: “How can they ask so much for such a product?”. Other people will say: “Well, this price reflects the high quality materials and sustainable production, I value this.”
Setting the price is quite alchemy. You need to take into account your estimated costs and prices of your competition. And also the price sensitivity of your audience. Sometimes, comparing your estimated costs & margin with price sensitivity of your audience and prices of your competitors might be a pessimistic moment because they are too low. However, that is why you do the research, it is ok to admit that it isn’t possible for you to produce under such price conditions. It doesn’t have to mean to stop the whole project. You can rethink some processes or factors that might lower the costs. Slightly change your attitude to the project and recreate the values that it is about to bring to the audience.
Let’s go through some questions you might ask in your survey to find out the price sensitivity of your audience. Feel free to use our survey template on product pricing, too.
You need to identify segments among your audience and choose your target group among all segments you have found. Why? Because you want to optimize your marketing costs (that create a huge part of total costs). You want to communicate your product to those people that are certain to buy it. If you communicate your product to all people, many marketing costs disappear into thin air and do not come back in the form of sales.
Segments are groups of people who share similar behavior within a group. Individual segments differ from each other in their behavior, demographics and other aspects.
How to recognize segments? Ask about the following aspects in your survey:
You do not need to ask for information that is already clear in advance. Again, ask questions appropriate to your specific situation. Thanks to the obtained data you can recognize different segments. Which one should you choose as your target group?
Try to apply the results of your market research to the whole market. This will give you an estimate of how large your segment may actually be. Be careful, you need to work with a representative sample of respondents. You can learn more about how to choose a survey sample on our blog.
Example: Your survey sample contains 10 000 respondents, your target group from the survey 1 500 respondents. The whole market contains 1 000 000 inhabitants so you can estimate that your real target audience is 150 000 people. From your market research data (price sensitivity and frequency of purchase) you need to count if this 150 000 people will bring enough sales so your project will survive.
Your competitors are here too. You need to observe them and know what they are doing better than you (and what you are doing better than them). You need to have your USP (Unique selling proposition) properly defined so you differentiate yourself from your competitors. If you have a very similar USP to your competitors, they are reaching out to the same target group as you. Take this into account and make an estimate of what your potential market share could look like when you share your target audience with your competitors.
You can ask in an independent survey, what brand would people choose if they wanted to buy the particular product and why. You will get an idea about the market shares and what to do to win competitors' customers.
Now when you know what people you will target, ask them about their specific preferences so you won’t fail them. Go into detail in following areas:
Nurture your target audience and it will come back to you in the form of a growing user base. The power of Word of Mouth will naturally kick in.
First of all, think through what we have already spoken about. Define your goals and specific information that you need to find out. Then you can start creating the survey questions. You can choose from 14 fully editable survey templates on market research (and 100+ overall) or create your own survey.
We have prepared articles dedicated to specific question types and their proper use on our blog, feel free to educate yourself more to apply the question types right and avoid collecting biased data.
With Survio you can:
Watch a short video how to create the survey in a few clicks.
Reach out to your audience in the most convenient ways to increase your response rate. There are various ways to collect responses, browse through our blog and Help Center section. Share your survey:
You can share your survey through one or two channels or you can combine all these channels together. Just find a combination that ensures you get enough completed questionnaires!
Watch your results in real time! Survio analyzes the results for you in clear charts and tables. You can always change the chart type to see the data in a different views! Download professional reports to present the results to your colleagues. Have them in one click in various formats (PDF, .DOCX, .PPTX, .XLSX, .CSV or Google Sheets).
You are doing this to find out if there is a chance that your product will succeed on the market. You are doing this to get a raw and objective view on the market situation. After researching the general interest into the product, price sensitivity and other aspects, you will find your target group and estimate if it has the buying potential you need to break into the market. Remember, efforts put into conducting a market research are not a waste even if the research would show there’s no room for you. It is always a safer way to decide on the basis of the data than to trust only your intuition. Well, combine data and your intuition and you are close to success!
