Published 15 Aug 2023
What is a Market Survey?
A market survey is a tool used by market research teams to gather data concerning a target market, product, or service. It helps organizations understand consumer buying habits, competitor landscape, and potential market risks. A market survey can be conducted via different channels including online and email, phone and field interviews, or focus group discussions.
In this article
- Benefits of a Market Research Survey
- Types of Market Research Survey
- The 3 Main Challenges of Conducting Surveys
- FAQs About Market Research Survey
- Overcoming the Challenges
- Featured Marketing Survey Templates
Benefits of a Market Research Survey
A market survey can be completed online and have the advantage of the speed and reach but can be limiting in terms of deeper insights. Conducting in-person field market surveys can help uncover deeper insights but is more challenging to plan, coordinate, and execute. Conducting a market research survey can benefit the organization with the following:
- acquire feedback and critical information about consumers;
- recognize customer inclination towards the product;
- analyze customer satisfaction levels to improve the existing product; and
- provide influential data towards business changes.
Types of Market Research Survey
A marketing survey is used by companies to gather information depending on the objective of the market research. It helps marketers to understand the consumers’ need to compare their products with their competitors. The data collected is utilized to analyze different market trends to ensure the right timing to launch a product or service.
There are several types of market survey an organization can use for their market research including the following:
- Market investigation survey – determines the vital information about the growth of the target market to perform competitor analysis.
- Customer retention survey – identify customer’s motivation in purchasing the services or products to understand customer trends on purchases and loyalty.
- New product demand survey – a statistical analysis of the product growth that leads to consumer’s appeal for a new product.
- Segmentation market survey – understanding the customer’s journey on why they have chosen the product or service.
- Customer profiling survey – a demographic analysis of the target consumers.
The 3 Main Challenges of Conducting Surveys
In-person field market surveys come with challenges that can cause difficulties in coordination, delays in execution, and strain on resources. Here are some of the challenges of conducting field marketing surveys:
- Logistics
- Market surveys, particularly those conducted in the field, involve sending field staff, supplies, and equipment needed for conducting market surveys.
- Implementing changes during or after the market survey means spending more time and more resources to implement the directive in the field. This may cause delays and put a strain on the budget for the market research.
- Data collection
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After a market survey is conducted, the data collected will be sent to the team leader for analysis and interpretation.
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Information collected using paper-based market surveys involves time-consuming data entry to send the information or physically sending paperwork to be manually organized and analyzed.
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- Data interpretation
- Data gathered out in the field will need to be collected, organized, and analyzed.
- Going through piles of paperwork and manually reviewing reports one by one will take so much time and energy. Taking into account the number of sites and the sample size, it will be burdensome to the market researcher and it will take a lot of resources to analyze and interpret data.
FAQs About Market Research Survey
To perform an effective market research survey, follow these steps:
- Know your objectives and set clear goals of what you want to achieve with the research..
- Identify which group of audience you’ll need to target for a valid result to materialize.
- Determine the type of marketing survey to be used.
- Choose the best channel to do the survey—it can be through online, interviews, discussions, or other forms of data gathering.
- Conduct the survey in a proper, timely, and practical manner. The goal is to maximize the sample size of the market that was chosen for the survey.
In order to create an efficient survey for market research, you must first determine if the questions would be for a quantitative or qualitative type of research. Build the survey from there then check these following tips :
- Ask simple, clear, and straight to the point questions that contribute to the goal of the research.
- Avoid leading and assumptive questions that can affect how respondents would participate in the survey.
- Categorize questions based on how they would best benefit the research.
- Add questions about respondents’ age, gender, region, or specific details important to the research.
- Make it concise and quick but as engaging as possible.
In addition, businesses can also always utilize ready-to-use market research survey templates that ease this whole process.
Market research specifically gathers data by obtaining insights from certain target markets while focusing on a product, customer feedback, or services. Market analysis on the other hand, is a broader practice that aims to collect information through various avenues—including market research—and use them as basis for future business decisions and increase growth options for the company.
Overcoming the Challenges
Conducting market research surveys in the field comes with inherent challenges that can be resolved with new technology. SafetyCulture (formerly iAuditor), the world’s most powerful mobile auditing app, provides the following digital solutions to any market research survey:
Convenient cascading of tasks
- Need to conduct a new survey? Create and share a new marketing survey template with your team. Field staff can begin at once using their mobile device.
- Need to make some changes to an existing market survey questionnaire? Edit the template using your mobile or desktop and automatically update everyone else’s copy. Kiosks at survey sites will automatically update.
- Need to have a survey done before the deadline? Schedule the team’s survey and give them a window. Know who has already completed their survey and how many times.
- Need to delegate different marketing survey questions for different groups at different times? Create different groups, assign specific market research survey templates, and schedule the deadlines.
- Intuitive mobile app and software that help build logical survey questionnaires – no programming skills needed!
Organized real-time reporting
- Automatically receive marketing survey results regardless of the volume of respondents and location of the site. SafetyCulture makes it easy to receive quantitative or qualitative data.
- Create response sets or use text fields to collect respondents’ answers. An unlimited number of photos can also be included.
- No more manual re-entry of collected results on computers. More time and energy for respondents and other market surveys.
- Geotagged surveys make it easy to identify where it happened.
- Survey reports show the exact date and time it was conducted.
- Know who did not complete tasks within the set window.
Analytics
Featured Marketing Survey Templates
Market Research Survey - Product Feedback
This market research survey template can be used by manufacturing businesses to gauge the reception of the target market to new or rebranded products sold at multiple outlets. This 7-item marketing survey template use scoring on its response sets to measure the overall customer satisfaction and gather feedback on the food product regarding the following:
- Taste
- Packaging
- Price point
- If the product reminds the customer of anything (nostalgia marketing)
- Likelihood of repeat business
- Likelihood of recommendation to friends/ family
Customers can provide comments and suggestions and optional name and signature at the end of the product feedback survey.
Marketing Survey Questionnaire - Retail Customer
A marketing survey questionnaire is used to gather customer feedback on their retail experience. Use on kiosks near cashiers or exits for easy visibility and access, this template helps customers provide feedback on the business’ appearance, products and services, pricing, staff, and overall customer experience. Customers can enter their comments and suggestions and include their name and digital signature. Gauge overall customer satisfaction and discover areas for improvement using analytics.
