Make a Market Survey

Market surveys are an important part of market research that measure the feelings and preferences of customers in a given market. Varying greatly in size, design, and purpose, market surveys are one of the main pieces of data that companies and organizations use in determining what products and services to offer and how to market them. These steps will teach you the basics of how to make a market survey and offer tips for optimizing your results.

Steps

Reaching the Right Market

1. Clarify the goal of your market survey. Before starting any planning, be certain what the goal of your market survey is. What do you want to find out? Do you want to try to assess how well your market will accept a new product? Maybe you want to figure out how well your marketing is working or reaching its designated audience. Whatever it is, be sure that you have a clear goal in mind.
   • For example, imagine that you own a company that sells and repairs computer equipment. Your goal with a marketing survey might be to figure out how many students at a local college know about your business and how likely they would be to buy from you for their next computer purchase or repair.
2. Determine and define the nature, extent, and size of your market. Before conducting a survey in a given market, you need to know what market you're targeting. Choose geographic and demographic parameters, identify customers by types of product, and get an idea of how many people there are in the market.
   • Narrow your market research to a short list of desired data: buying habits, for example, or average income.
   • For the computer repair business's situation mentioned above, this is fairly simple. You would be looking at college students. But, you could potentially try to focus on higher-income or more tech-focused students that could afford to buy more from you.
3. Determine what aspects of the market you want to investigate. This will depend entirely on your marketing goals and there are a large variety of options here. If you have a new product, you may want to figure out how well it is recognized or desired in a given market. Alternately, you may want to know about the specific buying habits of your market, like when and where and how much they buy. Just be sure to have a clear idea of what you want to find out.
   • Also clarify what type of information you want. You can ask qualitative questions, which ask for information that cannot be directly measured in numbers, like if the customer has any suggestions to improve a product or service. Alternately, you can ask quantitative questions, which ask for a numerical or quantifiable input, like asking for a rating from 1 to 10 of the effectiveness of the product.
   • You may also wish to figure out specifically what drove your previous customers to buy your product. In this case, be sure to ask recent buyers (within the last month) specific questions about their buying experience and how they heard about your product. You can amplify what these buyers found successful and fix any issues they experienced.
   • For the computer repair example, you could focus on how likely your previous customers are to return to you or how likely new customers would be to come to you rather than a competitor.
4. Find out where and when you can reach customers in your market. You might conduct a survey at the mall or on the street, via telephone, online, or through the mail. Your results may change based on the time of day and year. Choose a method and time that best suits your research.
   • When reaching out to customers, consider who your audience is. It can be either the goal demographic you determined earlier or just a group of your past customers.
   • Be sure to keep your target audience in mind, especially with online surveys. Your target market, especially if they are older, may not be accessible through online channels.
   • For example, the computer repair business might decide to interview students in person in a central location on campus or online through a commonly-visited website.
5. Determine what type of survey to use. Surveys can be split into two different general categories: questionnaires and interviews. The only difference is who does the recording of the respondents' information; in the questionnaire, the respondent records their own answers to the questions, whereas in the interview, the interviewer writes down what the respondent says. Beyond that, there are other options as to how the survey is administered, whether that's online or in person. Surveys can also be done individually or in groups.
   • Questionnaires can be administered either in person, through the mail, or online. Interviews can be conducted in person or over the phone.
   • Questionnaires are effective for market research and obtaining answers to closed-ended questions, however they might be expensive to print and can limit the respondent's capacity to express their thoughts.
   • Interviews allow the interviewer to develop follow-up questions to explore the respondent's thoughts more clearly, however they are more time-consuming for the interviewer.
   • Group questionnaires can be an effective way to attain results as respondents can collaborate to come up with more informative responses to your questions.
6. Consider online survey platforms. Online survey platforms offer a cost-effective way to organize your survey and survey results. Simply search for these platforms online and compare several that you find to assess which one offers the right tools for your survey. Just make sure that your choices are reputable survey platforms. You should also consider whether or not your target market is computer-savvy enough for online surveys to be effective.
   • Some of the most reputable and well-known platforms include SurveyMonkey, Zoomerang, SurveyGizmo, and PollDaddy.

Getting the Best Results

1. Choose a sample size. Your sample size should be statistically valid to produce reliable results. You may want to create sub-samples—e.g., "males," "18-24 year-olds," etc.—to decrease the risk of biasing your results towards certain types of people.
   • Your sample size requirements depend on how accurate you would like your results to be. The larger the survey size, the more reliable your results become. For example, a survey size of 10 participants leaves you with a very large margin of error (about 32 percent). This would mean that your data are essentially unreliable. However, a sample size of 500 gives you a more reasonable margin of error of 5 percent.
   • If possible, have your participants report demographic information on your survey. This can be as general or specific as you like. And make sure to put these questions at the beginning of the survey.
     • Be warned, though, that many people avoid surveys that ask for personal information.
   • For example, as the owner of the computer repair business mentioned above, you would want to interview a statistically significant number of students, perhaps splitting them up by major, age, or gender.
2. Develop a Research Questionnaire with answers that will provide the data you need for your market research. Your questions should be pointed and specific. Try to make each question completely clear in as few words as possible.
   • If your goal is to get your customers' real thoughts, focus on creating open-ended questions that customers can respond to with their actual thoughts, rather than with a rating or a multiple-choice response.
   • However, if you want numerical results, be sure that your answers in some way reflect that. For example, you could have participants rate products or services from 1 to 10.
3. Devise a way to quantify the answers you receive. If you are asking about preferences, you may want to ask respondents to rank their feelings numerically or using keywords. If you are asking about money, use ranges of values. If your answers will be descriptive, decide how to group these responses after the survey is complete so that they can be grouped in categories.
   • For example, your computer business could ask students how likely, from 1 to 10, they are to visit your store or what type of computer accessories they want most, depending on the type of information you need.
4. Identify variables that might affect your results. These usually include characteristics of people who are more likely to answer surveys. In order to get unbiased results, you need to figure out how to reduce the influence of these people.
   • For example, as the computer business owner, you could do this by screening participants before the survey. If you think you primarily do business with engineering students, only accept surveys from them, even if history or english majors are more likely to respond to your survey.
5. Have someone else look over your survey. Don't conduct a survey unless you've already given your forms to practice cases, perhaps friends or coworkers, to ensure that your questions make sense, the answers you receive are easily quantifiable, and the survey is easy to complete. In particular, ask your practice cases to make sure that:
   • Your survey isn't too long or complicated.
   • Doesn't make irrational assumptions about your target market.
   • Asks questions in the most direct way possible.

Carrying Out Your Survey

1. Set a time period and location for your survey. Be sure to choose the combination of the two that is most likely to result in the largest sample size. Alternately, if your survey is being done online, be sure to post it where you think it will get the most targeted traffic or send it to the best possible email recipients.
   • For an online survey, this would be the time period that your survey is open for (how long respondents have to complete the survey).
   • For example, imagine that for your computer business, your target market of engineers are busy all day with labs. You would want to schedule your survey either before or after this period.
2. If you are using a questionnaire, double check your survey forms. Be careful to proofread your forms several times and then have someone else do the same. Keep in mind that the survey should not be any longer five minutes and should have questions that are very simple to respond to.
3. Conduct your survey, maximizing sample size and accuracy of responses. Keep in mind that you may have to run your survey more than once in or several different places in order to get complete results. Just make sure that your survey remains exactly the same between times and places or your results may vary.
   • For example, as the computer business owner, you may choose several locations and days to survey students with different schedules.
4. Analyze your results. Record and tabulate numerical responses, being sure to calculate averages and analyze outlying responses (particularly low or high ones). Read through and analyze open-ended responses to get an idea of how your participants responded and what their thoughts are. Compile your information in a report that summarizes your findings, even if the report is for your personal use only.
   • Scan through your responses for really great quotes from customers. Anything particularly memorable, creative, or positive can be recycled for the company's future advertising.

Tips

• Surveys are inflexible by nature; the survey must be administered the same way to all respondents to standardize results. This means that you can't adjust the focus of the survey throughout the process, even if you determine that a previously unforeseen variable is very important. This is both a strength and a weakness of surveys and should be considered when formulating your survey.
• It's always better to make pointed, specific surveys than to try to cover a broad array of topics in one survey. The fewer topics you try to cover, the more detailed and useful the data you receive will be.
• Provide accurate results. It is much better to provide accurate results from a small sample, than add "fake" results, just to increase your sample.

Sources and Citations

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