SXSW Marketing Ideas: 3 Tips on Market Research
Table of contents for Tips from SXSW
- Interactive Marketing Tips from SXSW
- SXSW Marketing Ideas: 3 Tips on Market Research
We all think we have much bigger, deeper insight into our users than we actually do. If you think you understand your users you run the risk of overestimating what they want, you carry on bad habits, miss opportunities, don’t learn anything new or consider new ways to design. There are very few companies that have real design genius that can create products or sites without research.
Here are 3 Market Research tips for the rest of us:
• Be more concerned with what people do than what they say. Find ways to verify your research or customer feedback.
• When doing market research with customers, don’t call the customers that you like the most or are “just like you”. You will only confirm your own opinion and it won’t be a true measurement of all of your customer’s preferences or needs.
• You don’t have to spend lots of money outsourcing to a market research firm. In most cases it’s very difficult to act on a full report an outside team puts together. Simple, effective online surveys and targeted user testing are much more effective at answering specific user/design/or service decisions.
March 19th, 2009 at 3:23 pm
I’ve found a great, free, survey tool that has given me really good feedback over the last month.
http://4q.iperceptions.com
It’s amazing the great, candid comments I’ve received. It definitely helps in decision making of what steps to take next with my real estate web site.
March 24th, 2009 at 11:23 am
What about startup companies where you want to sell a product or service but yet to look out for customers ?
How can we get feedback ?
April 3rd, 2009 at 2:19 pm
If you don’t have a list of customers to send a survey invitation, you can still create the survey and post a link to it from your website. Add a call to action on your homepage that you are looking for feedback on X topic. Then ask partners, employees, and your email subscribers to forward to their network, twitter, or add a link to their facebook, linked in, or other social networking account.
July 4th, 2009 at 7:06 am
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