Conducting market research online: guide and tips

Whether you're launching a new business or improving an existing product, it's crucial to carry out market research beforehand. This marketing practice enables you to better identify the needs of your target audiences and refine your strategy for greater effectiveness. Use skilful techniques for your online surveys and questionnaires: you'll optimise the operation and development of your company's business.

A very recent development, online market research is being used more and more by many companies, particularly small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), who are making the most of it.

Online market research - definition

Like traditional market research, online market research is a process that involves studying and analysing your market. A company's market is the environment in which it operates: regulations, suppliers, competitors, customers, etc.

Online market research enables you to quickly obtain data on the real potential of a market, an activity or a product. It's also a good way of drawing up a good consumer insight, to find out how consumers perceive the problems and expectations associated with the products or services you offer, as well as the price they are prepared to pay for them.

What are the objectives for your company?

Why conduct online market research? The simple answer is to increase and boost your company's sales! More specifically, online market research will help you gather useful data on your business sector. The information you need to gather from your potential customers can be very varied:

• Market potential in terms of volume and value;
• The acceptable price level on the market;
• Leading targets;
• The customer buying process;
• Consumer insight (to study the motivations, expectations and experiences of
• about a product);

All this data will help you hone your marketing strategy, convert prospects into customers and boost your sales. But for this to happen, your online market research needs to be done properly!

How to conduct market research

Here are 6 step-by-step tips for conducting effective online marketing research:

1- Set your objectives

2- Take the time to think through your study

3- Choosing the tool for your online survey

4- Drafting the questionnaire

5- Market your survey

6- Interpret your results

The 10 benefits of online market research

Well-conducted online market research offers many advantages for your business or online shop, in terms of marketing and sales.
Here are the TOP 10 advantages of online market research:

1- Freedom of response

2- Lower costs

3- Save time

4- Easy to process

5- Questionnaire customisation

6- Removing borders

7- Adapting to usage

8- Integrating images and videos

9- Correction facility

10- Large panel of respondents available

The Internet offers a wide range of distribution options, depending on the target audience: e-mail, integration of the questionnaire into a website, distribution on forums or social networks, etc.

Which tool should you choose for your online survey?

There are many solutions available today for carrying out end-to-end online market research: Kwiksurvey, Surveygizmo, HlpDeveloppement, UpMyBiz and Eval&go.

One of the criteria for making the right choice: you need to be able to manage your online market research from start to finish in 4 main stages.

Here are the 4 essential stages that a tool should enable you to complete in order to carry out your online market research:

• Question creation: dozens of customisable question types are available for creating your online questionnaire: single choice, matrix, form, open text, etc.
• Questionnaire customisation: questions can be packaged and organised according to a scenario (EX. For example, you can go directly from question 2 to question 5 depending on the answer to question 2). You can then adapt the design of the questionnaire to your image by adding fonts, colours and a logo in line with your graphic charter.
• Publication: questionnaires can be integrated into your website, published via an anonymous link or sent by email. You can then monitor the number of respondents to your questionnaires in real time using tracking graphs.
• Results analysis : you can access a fully customisable automatic report that allows you to break down your results. You can then export this report in a wide range of formats or share it online.

SaaS software for online surveys, polls and questionnaires, designed and developed in France, stands out on the market: Eval&Go allows you to optimise your marketing, while guaranteeing you local support and the confidentiality of your data.

This solution guides you through the steps involved in creating your questionnaire and conducting your market research online. It also offers a range of practical features, such as

• Managing contacts for distributing questionnaires.
• Sharing and sending questionnaires via all existing channels: email, social networks, QR Code, link sharing, etc.
• Saving questions for later use.
• And much more besides.

Conclusion

Carrying out online market research allows you to verify the feasibility of your business project and to compare your product/service with its market.
You can get help from online software to carry out your market research more efficiently. Solutions like Eval&GO are perfect for this. They'll help you increase your company's sales, convert your prospects and build customer loyalty.