In the past, we BUDGETED for market research. This usually included our annual customer satisfaction survey and then we would simply look at our marketing plan and set aside a budget for new product research that we were going to do the following year.
These days, things are a little different. I find myself recommending a market research plan time and time again to small businesses, and that means I have to start explaining what a market research plan looks like.
Market Research Plan Why is it necessary NOW when it was not in the past?
The short answer is that it is a response to several trends that exist in our lives today that were not there in the past:
Social Media . The ability to use social media as a tool to gather opinions and analyze texts and chatter from your market about your company and brand is a relatively new phenomenon. The challenge is that if left unmanaged and underutilized, it is wasted as a valuable market research information resource.
Time-slicing . This is an interesting behavioral tendency among all of us. You can easily compare it to multitasking. Time-slicing, however, is more like inserting short tasks between longer tasks. Like checking emails on your mobile device while waiting in line.
Mobile Devices – Using mobile devices as computers and communication tools and as literal “hobbies” opens up a new way to reach our respondents when they only have a few minutes to spare.
Market Research Plan Summary
Setting Goals: I think it’s important to set a general goal or direction for romania phone number decisions you’re going to make over the course of the year. For the purposes of this summary, I’m going to treat goals as more general statements like “Start marketing products online.” The advantage of creating a general goal is that it focuses your mind in a specific direction and allows for some flexibility, which will be needed when you start thinking about strategies around the information and feedback you plan to gather.
Set Objectives: Every research project has objectives, and every marketing plan has objectives. So it stands to reason that your research plan should have objectives, too. In this case, your objectives around the research plan might include the decisions you are trying to make right now about that general goal of “marketing products online.” Some possible objectives might include understanding who our online customers might be, or how our target customer shops online, or the extent to which they use mobile devices to purchase or research products and services.
Lay out your collection channels. You've heard the term distribution channel; well, in research I call it the collection channel. This involves listing all the possible ways you can collect feedback and information from your target audience. These could include online surveys, MicroPoll, IdeaScale (crowd-sourcing), mobile surveys, social media, and a few others.
Brainstorm a list of questions. Now you can start brainstorming questions that will help you make your decisions. I like brainstorming questions because it focuses your mind on exactly what you want to know and why you want to know it. We can always edit the questions later based on which collection channel is best suited for the question.
Assign questions to collection channels. Again, none of this is set in stone. But it helps to get your mind on how to best leverage the collection tools that are available to you. Start assigning your questions to the channels that will provide you with the best information.
For example, treat your social media channels like you would an interest group. Start conversations with your Facebook fans and ask questions. LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are ideal channels to get your target audience involved in helping you develop more specific questions about the issues that matter most to your customers. Not only will you get feedback on how to ask the questions and what to focus on, you'll also get additional marketing and PR buzz about your mission and vision for what you're developing.