Mid-Term Team
Market Research Project
Students will
work in teams to develop a Market Research Plan Outline to solve a business
problem. The business problem will be presented during the class period.
(SELECT PROBLEM) Each team will prepare their plan using the following
guidelines.
1. Set Goals:
Set a general goal or direction about what decisions you’re going to be making
over the course of the year. Goals are general statements such as “Start
marketing products online.” The benefit of making a general goal statement is
that it gets your mind focused in a particular direction
and allows for
some flexibility – which you’re going to need as you start strategizing around
the information and feedback that you’re planning on collecting.
2. Set
Objectives: Every research project has objectives and every marketing plan has
objectives. So it stands to reason that your research plan will too. In this
case your objectives around the research plan might include the decisions that
you are trying to make right now around that general goal of “marketing
products online”. Some possible objectives might include understanding who our
customers would
be online, or how our target customer shops online or to what degree do they
use mobile devices to shop or research products and services.
3. Outline your
collection channels. Similar to the term distribution channel, a collection
channel involves listing all the possible ways that you can collect feedback
and information from your target audience. These might include online surveys,
MicroPoll, IdeaScale (Crowd sourcing), mobile device surveys, social media, and
some others.
4. Brainstorm a
list of questions. Brainstorming questions that will help you make your
decisions.This component will help the team focus on exactly what you want to
know and why you want to know it. You can always edit the questions later based
on what collection channel is best suited for the question.
5. Assign
questions to the collection channels. This will help the team figure out how to
best leverage the collection tools that are available to you. Assign your
questions to the channels that will provide the best information. For example –
treat your social media channels as you might a focus group. Start
conversations with your Facebook Fans and ask questions. LinkedIn, Facebook and
Twitter are all ideal channels for getting your target audience involved in
helping you develop more specific questions around the issues that your
customers care most about. Not only are you getting input into how to frame
questions and what to focus on – you’re getting some additional marketing and
PR buzz about your mission and vision about what you’re developing.
6. Outline which
crowd sourcing tools you will use such as IdeaScale to prioritize suggestions.
Now that you’ve gotten ideas from social media conversations – create an
IdeaScale space and seedthe space with the feedback you’ve learned. Then launch
that page to your social media community and ask them to vote and continue the
feedback on this space. Don’t forget to visit the space and offer feedback to
the community on how your development is going. Again – this is more marketing
and PR.
7. Create the
online surveys. Keep in mind that NONE of your respondents want to spend more
than 5 minutes on a survey. Just like online videos, their attention span is
about 2-3 minutes at best. After that they are bored and tired and leave. Test
your survey and if it takes longer than 5 minutes, look for alternative ways to
ask those questions.
8. Use MicroPoll
to supplement your online survey. MicroPoll is underutilized as a survey
instrument. People LOVE polls because they are short and they offer immediate
feedback. If your online survey takes longer than 5 minutes. Take a look at
which questions you can transfer to MicroPoll. You can launch a new MicroPoll
every week. This will keep your audience engaged and involved in what you’re up
to. (I think that’s more marketing and PR – while doing research – that’s what
I call leverage and multi-tasking)
9. Determine
whether or not you can you take it viral? Another important question to ask
yourself is if you can take your online survey viral in order to collect
feedback from a broader market segment than you are able to reach.
***Note that
viral surveys are most successful when you are
asking very broad and socially relevant questions.***
In other words –
questions around topics that people in a broader community can answer. NOT
technically sophisticated questions or questionsthat contain customer or
sensitive information. A good question for a viral survey might be “What
percentage of
sales do you spend on market research?” This is a general enough question
anyone can answer AND the answers across industry segments would be valuable.
10. Draw
conclusions and discuss next steps: What you will do with this information to
solve the business problem that you have been presented with?
Tips: Keep it short
and simple–No more than 7 pages.
Leverage the
free and low cost tools that are available
Brainstorm great
questions.
