How Do You Do Market Research?

As its name suggests, market research involves analyzing a market in detail to optimize the launch of one’s business or a new product or service. How to do relevant market research? Need more time to read? Check out our video on the subject!

What Is Market Research?

As mentioned earlier, market research is a detailed analysis of a particular market. You analyze your target, needs, demands, and fears. You also analyze your competitors, what they offer, their strengths, their weaknesses, and the customers they are targeting. A market study aims to identify areas where you can find a place for yourself and impose yourself.

Market research allows you to determine precisely what you should offer your customers, at what price, and in what way. It’s your guarantee not to do unnecessary actions. Doing market research consists of doing a field survey.

A field survey allows you to get an idea of the state of the market, consumer expectations, the degree of trust they place or are ready to put in your brand, and what they think of you or your competitors. In short, a field survey is a tool that allows you to learn more generally about your market.

If you do a relevant field survey, you can be sure that your market research will be too. You will then be able to build sales and marketing strategies that make sense and will have a good chance of working.

When To Do Market Research?

Market research can be done at any time in the life of a business. You can do a market study before starting your business. And honestly, we can only recommend it to you. In your business plan, you will have to demonstrate that your project makes sense, and doing a market study can show the full potential of your project and its viability.

You can also do some market research once you get started. For example, let’s imagine that your company wants to launch a new product or a new line, or let’s imagine that it wants to expand its brand. Well, to prepare for this launch, you need to carry out market research. Doing market research will help ensure that your customers will appreciate and be receptive to this change.

By doing market research, you will also learn about the competition already in this niche. We then speak of competitive study. If there is no one, so much the better. But honestly, that only happens very occasionally. Often there are competitors. So, you must include a study of the competition in your market study.

How To Carry Out A Market Study And A Field Survey?

As we said earlier, when we do a market study, we do a study of the competition and a field survey. This article will take a closer look at the field survey. A field survey consists of questioning a sample of people. It is up to you to define the people you will interview. You are also the one who will construct the questionnaire and choose how you will question your sample. You will also analyze the results to highlight exciting points and extract essential information.

Field Survey: Choosing Your Sample

How To Determine The Number Of People To Interview?

Let’s be clear; you will only be able to interview some potential customers. It would help if you choose a sample of people representative of your target clientele. Having a large sample of people does not necessarily guarantee you have qualitative or very reliable results. The quality of your results depends on several factors, such as the quality of the sample chosen, the relevance of your questionnaire, etc.

You can therefore select a small piece and have fragile results. In addition, the choice of sample size will depend on your budget. If you have a small budget, interview a small sample of around 100 people, and if you have a bigger budget, you can afford to interview a more extensive selection, say 400 to 800 people.

Which Sampling Method To Use?

Once you have determined how many people you will interview, you need to choose the type of person you will interview. By type of people, we mean the profile. Do you want to interview only women? Or only young people between 18 and 25 years old? It all depends on your target. The most widely used method of establishing a list of people to interview is called the quota method.

The principle of the quota method is simple:

You choose a given region, a region where you want to settle.
You collect statistics on this region on sites such as INSEE or Data. Gouv.
You reproduce the actual model on a reduced scale. For example, if 48% of women and 52% of men are in the region, and you choose to interview 100 consumers, then you will interview 48 and 52 men. You are not obliged to select gender as the distribution key. You can choose the age or socio-professional category, depending on your targeting.

Other sampling methods are much more complicated and complex to master and apply. Here, there is little point in talking about it.

Field Survey: The Content Of The Questionnaire

The Basic Rules To Follow

When you write the questionnaire’s content, keep sight of one thing: what do you want to know? What information do you want to collect, and what will you use it for? It is essential to clarify your objectives because they are the ones that will guide the way you will build your questionnaire.

Be sure to ask understandable questions that flow well and logically. The more your questionnaire is structured and flows smoothly, the easier it will be for respondents to answer. Make the questionnaire brief. If it is shorter, you avoid boring the people who answer it.

But make it a little short too. You need to gather enough information to draw factual conclusions. Find the middle ground. We advise you here to have your questionnaire tested by a few people so that they can validate it (like your collaborators or relatives, for example).

The Different Types Of Questions

You can choose several questions when you write your questionnaire as part of your field survey. Among the most common are:

One-choice closed question
Example: Do you have management software? The possible answer is either “yes” or “no.” Advantages: speed to answer the question and simple answer to process.
Disadvantages: we are not going to capture the feeling or the opinion of the consumer here. These kinds of questions have something “robotic” about them. We advise you to put the closed questions with single choice at the beginning of the questionnaire. This allows the respondent to enter the questionnaire with questions that are easy to answer.

Closed Multiple Choice Question

Example: What features do you like about the software? The suggested answers are: “customer management,” “inventory management,” “invoicing,” and “project management.” The interviewee can then choose several solutions.

Advantages: once again, the speed of answering the question and the simplicity of processing the answers.
Disadvantages: This question can influence the people questioned because of the answers offered. The answers can indeed be biased and not necessarily neutral. Another disadvantage is that if you carry out this questionnaire orally, the person will not memorize all the elements of the answers and will choose the solution he remembers the most.

The Open Question

The open question leaves the interviewee free to speak.

Example: What do you think of KPulse? The person then answers what they want.

Advantages: the answers collected are spontaneous, long, and rich in elements.
Disadvantages: it is more challenging to analyze the answers obtained. In addition, if the questionnaire is done online, respondents can skip these questions because they won’t want to take the time to answer them. We, therefore, advise you to put the open questions towards the end of the questionnaire, after the closed questions. At that time, the consumer’s curiosity has been aroused, and I think this is the best time when he will want and when he will be most able to express himself more freely and in more detail.

The Scales

The scales make it possible to measure, using a magnitude ratio, the opinion or expectations of the person questioned on a specific point. For example, measuring one’s satisfaction with a particular subject may be a matter of measuring it. For example: On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied would you say you are with KPulse customer service? 1 to 3 being somewhat dissatisfied, 4 to 7 rather happy, and 8 to 10 very satisfied.

Advantages: scales will allow you to qualify the answers obtained with the open questions. It’s a way to see if the responses of the person questioned agree.
Disadvantages: this question is not necessarily the best for the undecided, who will often choose 5 (on a scale of 1 to 10) and who will then distort the average and the median.

The Structure Of The Questionnaire

When you make a questionnaire in the context of a field survey, the order of the questions is significant. Indeed, how the questions will be ordered can psychologically affect the respondent, who will then be more open or not to answer them and devote time to them. Therefore, it is necessary to start with general questions, often closed ones.

Then, little by little, direct your questionnaire towards more precise or even personal questions, mainly through open questions. Always remember to introduce yourself at the beginning of the questionnaire. Tell a little about yourself and explain in what context you are conducting the questionnaire. At the end of the questionnaire, thank the person interviewed for their participation and the time they have been granted.

Finally, remember one thing: okay, you are doing this questionnaire to obtain information about the launch of your activity or the launch of a new product. But don’t stop there and take this opportunity to leave your contact details with the interviewee. It constitutes a potential future client to contact again later. Also, invite her to follow you on social networks or tell her more about your project.

A final point concerns the numbering of your questions. To save time, number each question: Q1, Q2, etc. Also, remember to codify the answers to simplify the analysis of the solutions later. For example, imagine that in question n°5 of your questionnaire, you ask: Do you use KPulse? In the possibility of answers, there is written: “if yes, go to the next question; if not, go to question n°20”. Please don’t mark that! Mark:

Q5: Do you use KPulse?

A: Yes ⇒ Q6
B: No ⇒ Q20

This will significantly help you in processing your results

Field Survey: Administration Of The Questionnaire

Now that we have seen how to choose your sample and construct your questionnaire, another point remains to be dealt with: how we will question people. The choice you will make to administer your questionnaire will depend on your survey type, the number of people asked, the information you want to collect, and also, let’s face it, the budget you have. So how can you interview people? There is :

The face-to-face interview allows you, in addition to gathering information, to meet your target, your likely consumers. You then have an actual exchange, a human and authentic interaction with the face-to-face. Afterward, the disadvantage is that conducting a field survey via face-to-face interviews takes time.

You have to organize the appointments and free up time to do the discussions (and that can quickly stretch over weeks or months before doing the interviews). But it’s still the best way to get noticed. Respondents will remember you more quickly, and it will be easier to contact them later.

On top of that, you can interview a sample of 400 people. A full selection of 100 people or even less is needed. It also depends on the number of collaborators who can conduct the interviews with you.
Telephone surveys: Conducting a telephone survey is a quick and economical way. However, glitches can often happen with phone numbers that are not necessarily the right ones, people who do not answer calls the first time and who answer after three attempts on your part, etc. And let’s not even talk about how easily interviewees can end the interview if they get fed up.
Surveys by post: surveying by the center is also economical and easy to set up. But it must be admitted that very often, the returns are weak. It would be best if you found a way to motivate the people you interview by combining this questionnaire with a contest.
Internet surveys: you must have noticed that in recent years, online surveys on social networks have become more and more fashionable. And this has several advantages: the questionnaire is available directly from a large number of people, the processing of the results can be done almost in real-time, and the cost of such a survey is worth almost nothing. Unlike phone or mail surveys, you’re more likely to get the correct number of people to respond. On the other hand, you risk reaching people who are only partially in your target.

It is, therefore, up to you to choose how you will distribute your questionnaire according to your budget, your expectations, the number of your sample, the time you wish to devote, the quality of the answers you want to obtain, etc.

Field Survey: Processing The Questionnaire

Once you have collected the answers to your questionnaire, you need to analyze these answers. As for the answers to closed questions, it’s easy to sort them. Often the possible solutions are “yes” or “no.” You will then be able to calculate the “yes” and the percentage of “no.” In case you have cross questions such as:

Do you use KPulse? Yes No
Can you specify your profession? Sales / Marketing / CEO

You can cross the two variables and find the percentage of people who answered “yes” and who are salespeople, marketers, and CEOs. You can do the same for those who answered “no.” In our example, those who use KPulse are more salespeople, and those who do not are more in marketing. And then, we get exciting statistics that can guide your strategy.

Regarding the scales, you will do averages or the median, which is not very complicated.
For open questions, it’s another pair of sleeves. The answers are often wealthy, and all seem different from each other. However, we will have to succeed in synthesizing and grouping them to analyze them. The exercise thus consists in grouping together all the answers which present a similar idea.

For example, let’s imagine the question “How do you rate the quality of KPulse customer service?” The interviewees said in their answers words such as: “good,” “average,” “not really satisfactory,” “great, “great,””very appreciable.” The qualifiers here are very numerous and all different.

It is only possible to bring out key ideas. They must then be grouped into categories of words. Here, “great,” “awesome” and “very valuable” can be grouped under the idea of ”excellent quality.” While “average” and “not satisfactory” can be combined under the qualifier “average quality.”

We advise you to carry out this exercise with several people to avoid subjective interpretations. Once this exercise is done, your field survey is over. You will then have to write a study report summarizing the results of your field survey. This research report constitutes approximately 80% of your market research. The remaining 20% concerns the study of the competition.

To Summarize

Market research is essential if you are building your business, launching a new product or service, or expanding into a new market. A market study mainly involves a field survey. You will question a representative market sample through a questionnaire constructed in the most intelligent way possible. The results you will get will allow you to generate valuable statistics and get started without a hitch with tangible strategic assets.