One of the best ways to become a better marketer and make more sales is to get to know your customers. After all, there is plenty of data that tells us that personalization is a primary factor in encouraging customers to do business with you. Personalized emails deliver six times higher transaction rates, and 80% of shoppers are more likely to buy from a company that offers personalized experiences. But if we don’t know our market or our customers, we’re missing out on this opportunity.
Using Ninja Forms to get to know our customers and our market helps you create opportunities to develop relationships with your customers, and it also helps us make better decisions as business owners. In today’s post, let’s review market research, how to do it, and how it helps your business grow.
What is primary market research?
As we head towards the end of the year when many business leaders begin their strategic planning, it’s an important time to take the pulse of your market and your customers. Needs and perceptions can change quickly, so asking questions can uncover eye-opening results.
Primary market research is direct inquiry that you conduct yourself, or hire someone else to do. This research involves asking questions and collecting data as well as analyzing the results.
The benefits of primary market research
There are a number of benefits of doing this primary market research. These include:
- Identifying customer pain points
- Identifying customer goals
- Finding similar possible target markets untapped by your marketing campaigns
- Discover terminology customers use to talk about their problems or goals
- Learn how customers perceive your products, services, and brand
- Finding competitor weaknesses
- Finding new products and services to expand your offering
- Minimize risks in developing new campaigns
- Verifying product-market fit
- Identifying new ways to provide personalized experiences
How do you conduct primary market research?
Primary market research can be conducted by three main methods: surveys, focus groups, or case studies. The most cost effective method of primary market research is surveying your customers and prospects, and there are some definite best practices toward conducting effective surveys.
We’ve collected some recommendations from market research experts that can help you create a world-class survey that uncovers market knowledge that will help you grow your business and better serve your customers.
- Short surveys. Your customers often don’t have much time to give to your market research project, so be aware of the initial time investment. Keep your questions succinct and specific.
- Ask clear questions. Be direct and specific and get to the point of your inquiry. Use objective language when asking specific close-ended questions. Objective language is based in fact. For example, “What type of meal did you have at our restaurant?” Respondents can choose from specific options of breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
- Use subjective language with open-ended questions. How did you feel after your meal at our restaurant? Here, you’ll be looking for feeling language that a customer might use to express emotions, attitudes, or beliefs about their experience. These types of questions give you qualitative data that can be much more in depth and meaningful.
- Use Likert scale questions. These types of questions can measure how customers feel about certain things. Likert scale questions usually have five or seven points in a multiple-choice answer. These often include strongly agree, agree, no opinion, disagree, and strongly disagree.
- Use conditional logic. Not all questions will apply to everyone you survey. For example, if a respondent had breakfast at your restaurant, it might make sense to ask about coffee and not the wine selection. The Ninja Forms Conditional Logic add-on let’s you selectively show questions dependent on previous answers, which will save your respondents time and make the survey experience more personal.
- Avoid leading questions. A leading question would suggest an answer to a respondent. In our surveys, we’re seeking customers’ actual feelings and beliefs about your business, product, and brand, so let them tell their story. An example of a leading question would be something that plants a seed for an answer you’d like to hear, such as, “Would you rather see the old version of the menu or this improved version?” A better option would be to ask the respondent which version they prefer, and why.
- Test your survey. Have friends, family, and colleagues take the survey and see if the results are clear. If someone misunderstands a question, your testing should identify this and give you clarity on how to reformulate your survey questions.
- A/B test your survey. If you want to see how specific wording affects answers, you can A/B or split test your survey. In this case, you can randomize various survey questions to determine whether or not wording affects answers.
- Get enough respondents. The more respondents you have, the more accurate your data. If you just ask one person or a handful of people, you might collect skewed data.
What kinds of questions should you ask?
The questions you ask should be specific to your business and your market. The more specific you can be about your products and the market you serve, the more you’ll learn. Generally, you should look for:
- Demographic information such as age, employment status, education level
- How your customers use your product
- What problem does your product solve for customers
- What goals do your customers have
- How your customers perceive your product
- How well does your product fit their needs
- What do you customers wish your product did for them
- What do they like most (and least) about your product
- How your customers perceive your brand
- What is important to your customers
- How likely customers are to recommend your brand
- If they’ve contacted support, what was their experience and why
Of course there are a variety of other questions that might be more specific to your business.
How often should you conduct market research?
Many businesses are performing market research regularly. A philosophy of always testing and determining market sentiment can help business owners quickly identify and react to subtle market changes, new opportunities, or widespread production problems.
Market research is a feedback loop that helps businesses optimize processes, rectify customer dissatisfaction, and find new ways to delight customers. Why not make market research an integral part of your overall customer experience?
The important factor to remember is to be non-obtrusive, and ensure that your question is contextual. Market data can be collected from:
- Initial site visitors. A single question to find out how they heard about you. This is a place where you want to be as unobtrusive as possible.
- Repeat site visitors that haven’t purchased. Are these customers finding what they’re looking for?
- After sale satisfaction. Once a product is delivered, this is a good time to deepen relationships and ensure that the customer finds success with your product.
- Long-term customers. How is the product or service working for them?
Why use Ninja Forms for surveys?
There are a number of reasons why using Ninja Forms for your market research surveys is superior to other platforms.
First, you own your own platform and you own your surveys, so there is much greater flexibility and opportunity than with a survey-only platform. Ninja Forms benefits include:
- Easily repurpose surveys. Copy a survey from one research project to the next.
- Control visibility. With Ninja Forms, you can easily develop a survey that only logged in customers can see. Be aware, however, that when doing so customers are aware that they’re logged in and may not be willing to provide honest negative feedback as that is tied to their user account. You may want to word questions accordingly.
- User analytics. When a survey is populated on your own site, you can measure user interaction with Google Analytics to determine where respondents came from, browser type and version, their operating system, geographic location, IP address, as well as UTM data including campaign, source, medium, as well as URL referrer.
- File uploads. If your survey requires users to upload a file, the Ninja Forms File Uploads add-on can assist.
- Numerous integrations. With the Ninja Forms Zapier add-on, there are unlimited ways to extend the functionality of your market research.
Powerful ways to get started understanding your market
Ninja Forms has everything you need to get started with a primary market research project, and has the added advantage of keeping your survey responses within the context of your brand on your website. As well, there are some additional features you won’t find elsewhere.
- Get started with the “Collect Feedback” template. This template is populated with some initial questions that can be copied into your survey questions.
- Consider making your survey multi-part. You can use the Multi Step add-on with one question per page. This allows survey respondents to give full attention to each question. Using the progress bar, users will know how much more of a time investment they have in providing feedback.
- Provide an incentive. Thank respondents for their time by providing some incentive, such as a discount coupon, a freebie, or a chance to win a gift card.
- Get respondents on your list. If a respondent takes the time to answer your survey, they’re likely interested in staying connected. Give them the option at the end of your survey to get on your mailing list. Use the demographic information you collect to segment your list for more personalized mailings.
- Connect survey results to Google sheets. If you’re collecting data continuously, use the Zapier add-on to connect your survey results to Google sheets. This opens additional opportunities for data visualization with Google Data Studio. Google Data Studio is an amazing, free tool that can bring together your reporting across multiple platforms and tie all your data together in one place.
Conclusion
Today, we looked at the importance of market research and some ways that Ninja Forms can help you be more successful by getting to know your market better. Have you been using Ninja Forms to perform market research? Let us know in the comments below.
