Before you develop a strategy for your business, you need to conduct market research. Understanding what your customers need and want and executing a strategy based on that information will determine whether your business will succeed or fail. As 20% of new businesses fail in the first year, learning about market and consumer trends should be a priority for any entrepreneur.
Through market research, you can gain key insights into the pain points of your customers. But to do this, you will need to ask the right questions. This article will explain the five must-have research survey questions for well-informed market research.
Ask for Demographic Information
Knowing the demographics of your potential market will help you understand them better. Whether or not you’ve completed online doctorate programs in marketing or statistics, analyzing customer data is a need for any business that wants to do well. Marketing and sales always go hand-in-hand, and the best way to convert through your campaigns is by being aware of who will be your potential buyers.
Demographic information involves data on your respondent’s age, gender, location, income level, and educational background. This means you’ll get a mix of quantitative and qualitative data to help segment the market according to their purchasing power and preferences. Below, you can see an example of how this is done.
Here are some sample questions you can ask to learn about the demographics of your market:
What is your age group?
What is your gender identity?
What is your highest level of education completed?
What is your household income?
What is your employment status?
Just bear in mind that data on demographics tends to be sensitive data, so you should consider getting this information through an anonymous survey maker. You should also make sure that you take any necessary steps involved in collecting sensitive information.
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Evaluate the Consumer’s Product/Service Awareness
A big part of marketing campaigns is understanding what your customers or potential customers know about your business. If you have brand awareness or if consumers in the market are educated about your product/service, it can be a lot easier to map out a communication strategy. On the other hand, if there is little to no brand awareness around your product or service, you will need to invest a lot of time and effort to maximize your conversion from the top of your funnel.
To identify which consumers are at the top, middle, or bottom of your funnel, you can questions like:
Have you heard of our product/service before?
How did you first hear about our product/service?
What are your perceptions about our product/service?
Understanding where your brand is positioned from the perspective of consumers can help you allocate the right budget in your marketing campaigns and improve conversion rates.
Today, staying on top of design trends is key. You need to know what is on trend in terms of visual aesthetics to help you create marketing collateral and an attractive product design. This way, your brand can stay relevant, especially when you’re making promotional items or updating your website's design to keep your marketing and product strategies fresh and engaging.
You can also leverage ad exchanges to amplify your brand's visibility and reach.Collect the data quantitatively or qualitatively, depending on the framework your marketing team decides to adopt. After collecting data, your team can analyze the report and make informed decisions.
Measure Customer Satisfaction
Another reason why marketers conduct surveys is to perform a retrospective on how their product or service is performing. After all, the customer is always right. Through a well-designed survey, you can measure customer satisfaction and input their feedback into your overall strategy.
There are a couple of ways you can go about asking customers regarding your products or services. You can measure their satisfaction on a scale and assign actions your company needs to take depending on their responses. Alternatively, you could be more direct and ask them for a qualitative response, like how you would ask a focus group.
Ask questions like the following:
On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product/service?
What aspects of our product/service do you find most satisfying?
What improvements would you suggest to enhance your satisfaction level?
Assess Your Consumer’s Purchase Behavior
Changing human behavior is the dream of any entrepreneur who wants to disrupt a market. You will want them to choose your product/service over the same offered by your competitors. But for this to happen, you need to have an understanding of the current behavior of your customers.
With data on consumer behavior, you can optimize your sales and marketing strategies by collecting data and analyzing it as a heat map.
When your website heat map is ready, you can create better-targeted campaigns, like placing call-to-actions (CTAs) on certain areas of your website. You can also work with your sales team to identify a heat map of your sales territories to make informed decisions for efficient targeting, such as promoting popular products in particular locations.
Here are some questions you can include in your surveys:
How frequently do you purchase our product/service?
What factors influence your decision to purchase our product/service?
Have you recommended our product/service to others? If yes, why?
Reach for Feedback and Suggestions
Businesses that use feedback to optimize their processes outperform by 80% compared to companies that don’t. This makes sense because people’s preferences and behaviors change over time.
With this in mind, your company needs to evolve. Even though incorporating suggestions and feedback can be difficult to implement, it will help you to understand what you can improve in how you serve your customers.
Feedback and suggestions are usually measured in terms of opinions gathered during market research. It will be up to the strategic leaders in your company to decide whether or not action needs to be taken or if your business can stay as it currently is.
Consider questions like the following to collect feedback or suggestions:
Is there any additional feedback you would like to share about our product/service?
What features would you like to see added or improved in our product/service?
How likely are you to continue using our product/service in the future?
Check Out These Market Research Survey Templates You Can Use
If you’re not sure where to start with your market research survey, involve.me offers many customizable templates that you can adapt for your needs. Here are some examples that you can look into:
Event Feedback Survey Template
After an event, you can ask attendees to complete a survey to know what can be improved in future events to make them more successful.
Customize this template for free.
Brand Knowledge Quiz
Find out what the market thinks about your brand through the involve.me brand knowledge quiz template. You can make the survey more attractive by offering them a prize in the end as part of a campaign to attract more TOFU and MOFU customers.
Customize this template for free.
Amazon Review Funnel Template
Learn what your customers think about your product through the involve.me Amazon review funnel template. They’ll need to fill in an order number, along with some details of your order.
Customize this template for free.
Use the Right Market Research Survey Questions Today
Whenever you conduct a survey for market research, you need to target key areas such as market demographics, customer satisfaction, and purchase behavior. Whether you’re trying to make money on Etsy, or manage a global brand, you need to stay on top of trends to keep your marketing approach relevant. You will also need to gather feedback for improvement since many businesses that prioritize customer feedback are more likely to succeed. By incorporating some of the questions suggested above into market research surveys, your business leaders can gather valuable insights to inform their strategies more effectively.
Author bio
Professor Imed Bouchrika, PhD is the chief data scientist contributing to the foundation of the academic research portal Research.com.
