Know your consumers! Tools to help you out…

Before launching a new product in the market, it’s safe to know the potential demand for it by getting the opinion of your target audience. This usually means surveying a large number of consumer opinion panels that reach well beyond your existing customer lists. Knowing about the market is very important. It gives you an idea of where the market is heading, info about the demand and supply chain and moreover whether there is place for a new product in the market.

Expensive?! No longer!

Until recently, such consumer research was prohibitively very expensive for many small scale businesses. Not only did you have to hire a company to conduct your surveys, but you also had to pay them a lot to get the results tabulated and presented in interpretive reports and formats, so that you could analyze them to make decisions.

It used to be pretty time consuming too. Such surveys could take months to create, conduct and analyze. But now with the help of technology and science and thanks to some brilliant human minds, consumer research has become relatively very easy and less time consuming. Now there are many tools available that make the job of consumer research almost effortless!

Helping Hands!!!

1)      AYTM (Ask Your Target Market) – It enables you to create surveys and then send them to your own lists or to the AYTM panel of more than 4.5 million people. You can choose your own target audience, such as gender or geographic region, and include a variety of questions, as well as images and videos. It’s very cheap too with the price of 95 cents per completed survey.

2)      GutCheck – It is a qualitative market research tool that enables you to conduct one on one, 30 minute, online interviews, with some of the 3.5 million members of its U.S. consumer panel. You can target customers based on a variety of criteria, such as age and income, to ensure you’re talking to the right person.

3)      uSamp – uSamp provides custom targeting with its 6.5 global panel members as well as pre-defined consumer lists which you can survey using its Survey-builder tool.

4)      SurveyMonkey – It is best known for enabling you to send online surveys to your own list. You can also have a chat to its panel members.

5)      Zoomerang – This is uSamp on steroids ! The only difference is that it has 2 million panel members instead of 6.5 million!

So by using these tools you not only save your time and money but you also get quality results and power packed data which is invaluable. Consumer research tools can make your research speedy, swift and very effective. It is now only a question of choosing the right tools for your needs!