As a business owner, you know the importance of conducting high-quality, accurate market research. Having the right data will help inform your decisions about the products or services you offer. Whether you want to evaluate new markets locally or internationally, great market research can help you access niche market segments and save money. But if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional market research firm, you’ll need to get creative.
Julian Narchet, a marketing and mass communications professional, will offers six cost-effective market research ideas to get the data you need for your business.
Create an online survey
The cornerstone of any market research drive is a well-written survey. Online surveys are free to create and can provide valuable data about the pain points experienced by your current or potential customers. Surveys are easy to distribute to people on your email list or via social media. You may use discounts, freebies, or other incentives to increase the response rate and get valuable insights into your customer base.
Write blogposts
Starting a blog is completely free and can help you gather data and test the effectiveness of ideas and concepts. High-quality, original content about your business or ideas will help attract readers and generate plenty of real-world user feedback about your products or services. The data you get from blog post comments can help inform your decisions about which direction you should be taking your business in. You can also include a call-to-action at the end of blog posts that encourage readers to complete your market research survey.
Write articles
Regardless of which idea or product you are trying to research, it has to meet a need. That’s why one of the most effective ways to explore your market on a budget is to write high-quality articles and share them on trusted sites like LinkedIn. If you provide helpful information about your product or service and let readers know about your company, you can increase traffic to your blog, website, or survey. Offering unique data, insights, and information that people find helpful is a great way to increase the number of survey respondents.
Research shows that people are much more likely to remember information presented through videos than the information they read. That’s why one of the most cost-effective market research ideas is to turn your blog posts and articles into short videos and share them on social media. There are many free sites like Lumen5 that make creating videos a breeze. You can then post the videos to YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and other social media platforms to generate awareness about your market research survey.
Social media ads
Social media ads like Facebook ads and TikTok ads effectively drive potential customers to your website, blog, or survey. To keep your ad spend manageable, try installing Google Analytics or a Facebook Pixel on your blog and tracking how many visitors you are getting and how they found you. This gives you a solid lead about which ads are working and which you should drop.
Pay for a subscription database
Wouldn’t it be great if you knew what your competitors were doing all over the world? One of the best ways to find out is to look at studies, surveys, and market reports, but what if you need these translating? Some companies provide a solution; you can pay to join a subscription database and use keyword search tools to find the information you need in any report. You can then use this market research data to gain a competitive advantage. This is the most expensive option on this list, but it still gives you quality research for a fraction of the cost of hiring a market research consultant or engaging the services of a professional firm.
Final thoughts
Hopefully, if you’re looking to conduct market research on a budget, these six cost-effective ideas should help you get started. If you’re willing to put in the work yourself, the only cost will be your own time. By combining all six ideas and using your blog and social media channels to generate more survey responses, you’ll be able to get the high-quality market research data you need to make informed decisions for your business.
About Julian Narchet
Julian Narchet is a marketing and mass communications professional and a Communications Specialist at the University of Miami. He has extensive experience in customer service, market research, academic research, social media, public relations, and event management. He is passionate about making a difference in the lives of others through cooperation with non-profits and healthcare organisations.
Dennis Relojo-Howell is the managing director of Psychreg.
