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Conducting market research online: guide and tips

Conducting market research online: guide and tips

By Charlotte Goyard

Published: October 25, 2024

Whether you're launching a new activity or improving an existing product, upstream market research is crucial. This marketing practice enables you to better identify the needs of your targets and refine your strategy for greater effectiveness. Use the right techniques for your online surveys and questionnaires: you'll optimize 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 the process of studying and analyzing your market. A company's market is the environment in which it operates: regulations, suppliers, competitors, customers and so on.

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 drafting 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're willing to pay for them.

Objectives for your company

Why conduct online market research? The simple answer is to increase and boost your company's sales! More precisely, online market research will help you gather useful data about 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;
  • Acceptable market price levels;
  • Leading targets;
  • Customer buying processes;
  • Consumer insight (to study the motivations, expectations and experiences of
  • product);

All this data will help you hone your marketing strategy, convert prospects into customers and boost your sales. But for this to happen, you need to get your online market research right!

How to conduct market research

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

1- Set your objectives

Determine what kind of data you want to collect, and what you're going to do with it. A single study may not be enough to answer all your questions.

2- Take the time to think through your study

Define the criteria and questions that will make up your online market study.

3- Choosing the tool for your online survey

There are many online tools available to help you conduct online surveys easily and efficiently: Kwiksurvey, Surveygizmo, Eval&go...

4- Drafting the questionnaire

Ask consumers precise questions, so as to obtain answers that will be easier to exploit later.

5- Market your survey

You need to make your survey visible. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter will help you give it visibility.

6- Interpret your results

Online market research tools such as Eval&go can be used to interpret and exploit the results of your online survey more easily.

10 benefits of online market research

Well-executed online market research offers many marketing and sales benefits for your company or online store.
Here are the TOP 10 advantages of online market research:

1- Freedom of response

Unlike traditional market research, respondents can decide to remain anonymous and alone in front of their screen, without being influenced by an interviewer.

2- Lower costs

On-line software offers attractive, flexible rates compared with research institutes.

3- Save time

Setting up and sending the questionnaire is as easy as a few clicks. Responses are then collected in real time.

4- Ease of processing

Results can be consulted in real time, and analyses are performed automatically.

5- Questionnaire customization

Online, you can adapt the design of the questionnaire to your graphic charter and make the experience fun with different types of questions and redirections.

6- Removing borders

The Internet reduces distances, enabling multilingual and/or multi-country surveys to be distributed.

7- Adapting to usage

In the face of hyper-connected consumers, offering an online survey means being in tune with their habits, allowing them to respond at any time.

8- Image and video integration

You can integrate a wide range of elements into online questionnaires, such as images and videos. This increases their potential.

9- Correction options

Everything happens in real time, so a question can be corrected even after the survey has been distributed.

10- Large panel of respondents available

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

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 or Eval&go.

One of the key criteria for your decision: you need to be able to manage your entire online market research project in 4 main stages.

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

  • Question creation: dozens of configurable question types are available to create your online questionnaire: single choice, matrix, form, open text...
  • Questionnaire customization: questions can be packaged and organized 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, adding fonts, colors and logos in line with your corporate identity.
  • Publication: questionnaires can be integrated into your website, published via an anonymous link or sent by e-mail. You can then track the number of respondents to your questionnaires in real time using follow-up graphs.
  • Results analysis : access a fully customizable automatic report that lets you break down your results. You can then export this report in a variety of formats, or share it online.

Eval&Go is a SaaS software solution for online surveys, polls and questionnaires, designed and developed in France, which stands out from the crowd: Eval&Go optimizes your marketing while guaranteeing local support and data confidentiality.

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

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

Conclusion

Carrying out online market research allows you to verify the feasibility of your business project in concrete terms, and to compare your product/service with its market.
Online software can help you 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 prospects and build customer loyalty.

Article translated from French