One of the main difficulties that marketers face in their work is the lack of tangible results of their work. They launch new products, concepts, and advertising campaigns into the world, and all they get in return are numbers in sales reports.
Many are forced to make decisions and act blindly because they do not have the tools to measure marketing KPIs: brand strength, recognition, image, customer loyalty, etc. Previously, these metrics were only available to large companies, but with the spread of the Internet, surveys have become cheap and accessible to the general public.
Nowadays, in order to carry out a quantitative survey, it is enough to send questionnaire letters to your customer base, place a survey advertisement on the Internet, or order a representative sample in one of the online panels. An online panel is a database of respondents who have agreed to participate in surveys on a regular basis.
How to do market research
The easiest way is to contact a specialized agency. But this is expensive, and you need to be sure that the results will help you make decisions that will pay back the investment. Unfortunately, this is not always the case, so let’s consider guerrilla methods available to all.
Getting feedback from your own customers is easiest: email newsletters, short questions in messengers, or phone calls are all almost free.
Sample size, quotas and random sampling
Quantitative research uses a sample of respondents whose opinions are generalized to all consumers with a small margin of error. In order to judge all consumers by a small fraction, three important aspects must be controlled for:
A sample size of at least 100 participants;
random selection of respondents;
adherence to quotas.
Statistics work well when there are 100 responses. In truth, the law of large numbers turns on even after the 30-response mark, but samples that are too small involve assumptions and limitations that only professional statisticians are familiar with.
Randomness of selection is a second important principle. You can’t judge average height by the measurements of a hundred basketball players who practice in your front yard.
A perfect sample is when every person has an equal probability of being among those surveyed. Completely random sampling is difficult to achieve (it’s very expensive), but it’s something to strive for. Online surveys, by definition, weed out all the people who don’t use the internet. If your target audience is media-users or retirees, then use a phone call.
Quotas are the proportions of traits that must be met in a sample. If you are interviewing a potential audience, make sure that men, women, people of different ages, and other subgroups are evenly represented.