Market research is one of the best ways to find out information, factual or perceptual, from existing or potential customers, about your product or service offering.
However many small business owners don’t employ market research methodologies because they find them too academic and perceive them to have no relevance in their small business.
Essentially any time you ask a potential or existing customer a question you are conducting market research and the only thing you need to do is to structure questions and collate the information in order for it to have more value in your small business.
The best researchers you have are probably sitting not far from you right now! That’s right your staff are the best researchers you’ve got and they’re really cost effective too because you don’t have to pay them any more than you already are.
Why not take a few minutes right now and develop three questions your staff can ask every person they come into contact with in the next week and ask them to note down the answer. That way you can assess the responses and use market research to assist you in making those critical business decisions that are currently weighing on your mind at the moment.
If you can’t think of anything else why not try these three questions:
a) What do you like most about dealing with us?
b) What do you like least about dealing with us?
c) If we could change one thing that would make it easier to do business with us, what would that one thing be?
As with any market research the most important thing is to remember to ask the right people or your responses won’t be valid and, as mentioned above, to collate the responses into some meaningful format so that you can use the responses to assist you in making future business decision.
Getting to know what really matters to existing or potential customers is the key to successful business so once you’ve completed the cycle once go back and hone your questions and then the following week pose three different questions.
It’s lots of fun and you’ll be amazed, your customers will tell you exactly what you need to do to keep them happy, you don’t need to guess!
