Information is Power

SYNOPSIS IN POINT FORM

• Don’t let yourself be intimidated by the jargon
• You can do it yourself, outsource it all, or go for a combined approach
• You have to know your audience, their habits and their preferences to make the right business decisions
• Make up your questionnaire by listing the info you really need to know
• This may include customer info, competitor & brand preferences, perception of your business
• You may also harvest crucial contact data through a survey
• Choose the best channel/s to run the survey – in-store/onsite, electronic survey forwarded by email, on your web site or FB page, over the phone, physically interacting with consumers in public places
• Sample size can vary greatly, often a minimum of 500 questionnaires is required
• Analysis may be quite easily done using simple spreadsheets
• Make sure you utilise the results to adjust your business development and marketing

FULL ARTICLE

Market research, sampling, survey methodology, client perception survey, survey data collection, statistical reports, questionnaire construction, data analysis – the jargon goes on and on and on.

What I would suggest to the uninitiated is to simply ignore all of the above and simply ask themselves one thing. What are the important details and the crucial information about their market and their customers which would be vital to have in hand?

It might be these daunting terms and the seemingly insurmountable complexity of surveys that put so many businesspeople off this extremely vital function.

Do not steer your business in the blind. You cannot operate in the dark. Your assumptions are much further from the truth than you believe. No matter how improbable this might sound, the reality is such that the more you know your business perfectly from the inside, the less you know it from the outside.

It is therefore always best to stop guessing and assuming and to collect some real facts and figures.

You can do it all yourself, you can outsource it all, or you could also combine both with a mixed approach. Whichever direction you take it will always serve you well to know the basics.

Start off simply and logically from the beginning and ask yourself the most basic questions.

What would you like to know? Is it who your clients are? In that case your questions will relate to relevant issues such as gender, age, marital status, location of residence, occupation and interests.

You might want to know their purchasing behaviour and ask questions such as how much they spend, how often they buy, how and where they purchase and why, what they look for before buying and even test some of your sales ideas to see if these sound attractive or not.

You could also focus largely on your competitors and inform yourself perfectly of how the market is divided and why. In this case your questions will be based on asking for preferences of suppliers/outlets, brands, product types, pricing and other related issues. This could be given different perspectives. You could ask the customers to quote names themselves, you could ask them to comment upon your pre-established lists, or you could also ask them what each of your selected competitors signify to them and to what they associate each one of them to.

Your survey could also focus on the perception both customers and non-customers have of your business. You could start by asking who and how they heard of you initially, then inquiring about the products they purchase from you and the ones they don’t, their likes and dislikes, their suggested improvements to what you offer and gauge their satisfaction in various aspects and levels.

Many surveys are in fact a mix of all or several of the above. Often surveys are also utilised to obtain customer contact details which are then used directly for marketing purposes. However always keep in mind that people’s time, patience and attention span are very short, so your questionnaire must be brief, or at least look brief. In many cases consumers are offered some form of reward or incentive for completing the survey.

You then need to identify the best channel to run your survey and here again there are many convenient options. If it is a client perception survey where you are targeting your existing clients, then by far the most practical method might be to conduct an in-store/onsite survey, as that is where you can most easily find them. Otherwise you could create an electronic survey via many of the dedicated web sites and forward this via email and other online methods to your contacts. You could create a dedicated area on your web site or Facebook page. You can also conduct telephone surveys and you could engage interviewers to physically interact with consumers, either in public places, or in strategic locations.

The size of your sample base is another decision you will have to make based on practicality and resources. It is obvious that the more data and information you collect the richer and the more precise your data bank will become. In most cases the benchmark of 500 questionnaires is taken as a minimum quantity, but this too depends entirely on the circumstances at hand.

So this leaves us with the analysis of the data collected, which again does not need to be a weird and wonderful science. You can do miracles with a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Create a column for each separate question/reply and enter all the data accordingly. Naturally you can create pop down menus for the answers with set replies to speed up the process of data entry.

Once all the data has been duly entered, you can create different sheets presenting the replies in different formats and each sorted accordingly. Add in your formulas and calculations to indicate totals, subtotals, averages, medians, etc. And you can finish it all nicely by also including any percentages you find of interest. Percentages may be calculated for the same answer within the same column, as in how many of these people purchase product ‘a’, ‘b’ or ‘c’. It may also be calculated across different columns/questions, as in how many people over 40 purchase product ‘a’.

The permutations are endless and you may analyse any data against another, finishing off with figures and proportions of say females, who have heard of you, but who have never purchased from you (non-clients), who shop at competitor x, but who would shop from you if you stocked product ‘y’.

The last and by far the most important factor in all of this is that you do not conduct the survey for nothing. Quite incredulously this is often the case. A survey is commissioned, conducted and analysed and the data sits in someone’s in-box/tray for months on end, until it is filed somewhere in the dark never again to see the light of day.

Conducting a survey is a very good idea. But only if you then read and reflect on the finding and truly use them to adjust your overall business plan, your marketing strategy and your promotions accordingly.