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Bring the Research Home - Technology Information - Tutorial

Forget costly printing, mass mailing, and slow response. Conducting market research online is fast and affordable

The phenomenal growth of the internet has probably stirred up your markets considerably. But you can take advantage of Web technologies to spot trends earlier and respond more quickly. Sophisticated market research--traditionally the purview of larger companies with larger budgets--is now available using software and resources you already have. Using a Web site or even just an e-mail account, you can create and run your own market surveys, and receive feedback within a day.

Changing the Rules Although do-it-yourself market research sounds appealing, conventional wisdom cautions against it. "I've seen too much bad research," says Mike Exinger of Clearwater Research in Boise, Idaho. "When your entire future depends on making the right decision, wrong research can be expensive."

Nevertheless, there's reason to roll up your sleeves and get started. No one knows your business --the questions that need answering and who can answer them--like you do. Along the way, you'll find ample help online, and in the end, you'll gain fresh perspective on your markets--without having ponied up a hefty consultant's fee.

Start With Secondary Sources All pieces of published information--press releases, census data, government publications, clippings from libraries, back issues of magazines--are secondary sources potentially invaluable for helping you better understand your markets. To get started, do a quick review of existing data using any major Internet search engine. A good launchpad is www.askjeeves.com, a natural-language engine with metasearch capability that will give you responses from five major engines.

David Spyres, of Spyres & Associates, Webster, Tex. (www.spyresinc.com), specializes in secondary research. His "absolute favorite site," CEO Express (www. ceoexpress.com), is loaded with links to magazines, newspapers, newsfeeds, Web site locators, published source data, and more. Also, try the mother of all U.S. statistical data sites, www.fedstats.gov. Here, you can search the databanks of more than 70 federal government agencies. The site contains plenty of broken links, but they shouldn't keep you from finding what you need. Although such sites offer an enormous wealth of free information, don't underestimate the effort you'll need to turn your findings into useful market data. Linda Schaible of Re:Search Group in Orlando, Fla., cautions, "Your time is valuable. Know when you should just pay someone not only to find your data but [to] turn it into information."

Market Research 101 To find out what's happening with your customers and markets, you need to ask the right people the right questions. For a crash course in market survey research, look to Venture Data's ResearchInfo (www.researchinfo.com). You'll find tutorials on how to create online surveys, build questionnaires, and program a Web site that can talk back to you. There are also free calculating tools, downloads, source directories, libraries, and chat rooms. Once you've initiated yourself in the ins and outs of market research, follow these five basic steps to build your own surveys.

Research Design Begin by asking two questions: What do you want to know, and who can give you the information? The answers set your boundaries and define the universe you'll be sampling. Write out your research design in a few sentences. This is the foundation, so take your time getting it straight. Keep it simple, and avoid overloading your design with too many objectives.

If you want to expand a home-based tax service business, for example, you'll want to explore how broad a geographical area you can reach, as well as the receptiveness of different business types to your services. The design might read, "I want to know where to deploy my marketing resources to expand my business. The business managers of small to midsize companies within the surrounding five-county area can provide me with this information." The first statement spells out your objective; the second states your hypothesis and defines research boundaries.

Questionnaire Development Producing an online questionnaire is fairly straightforward. Again, keep it short. Ask the easiest questions first, then test them out on your friends and associates. Promise--and preserve--confidentiality. And don't forget to offer an incentive for people to respond. Although logo T-shirts and coffee cups are fine, a cleverer and cheaper incentive is mailing your respondents a state lottery ticket.

For help formulating questions, turn to two good online sources. Tregg Farmer, president of the InfoTek Research Group in Beaverton, Ore. (www.infotekresearch.com), analyzes a variety of approaches and provides a white paper with a chart outlining eight types of questions, with examples graded for effectiveness. Glenn Davis, vice president of the Waltham, Mass., company DataStar (www.surveystar. com), offers a short tutorial demonstrating different questionnaire options.

To help sharpen your questions and gain additional insight into your survey group, consider running an online focus group as well. Use a chat room for real-time responses, post a bulletin board on your site, or post questions to a related usenet group. Research, a company based in Rockville, Md. (www.digitalbiz.com), also offers online Web surveying and provides examples.

Sample Selection "In statistical terms, a sample represents the universe from which it was drawn and no one else," says Bill Eaton, vice president of marketing for Creative Research Systems. "You cannot ask men for the opinions of women, [or] Republicans for the beliefs of Democrats." In the home-based tax service example above, the only people who should be interviewed are the targeted business managers in the five-county area.

Once you've defined your universe, it's time to generate an e-mail list of recipients. By checking your favorite search engine, you'll find trade and association lists, magazines offering subscriber lists, and long lists of individuals and companies affiliated by universities, government organizations, and more. If you still can't find a particular address, pick up the phone and request it.

Data Collection There are at least four good routes for collecting your responses. First, you can hire a programmer to write a small routine that automatically downloads your questionnaire into a database file. Ask your ISP, a computer science student at a nearby college, or see GCT-US (www. gct-us.com), which offers a program that sends survey responses directly to your Web site for a typical cost of $200.

Second, you can turn to an online provider such as NetReflector (www. netreflector.com), which will step you through the questionnaire-building process, post your questionnaire on its site with a unique URL, then tabulate and analyze your results. Pricing is based on the number of responses, with a free trial offered for surveys with fewer than 25 responses. There's also a free online survey research service, INET (www.inetsurvey.com), developed by Jitendra Lulla at Rutgers University.

As a third option, you can rely on your own e-mail for both delivery and response. This approach is dirt cheap, though time-consuming: You paste your questionnaire from your word processor into an e-mail message, which recipients fill out and return. This method lets them type in lengthy comments, but you'll have to manually enter all response data into a spreadsheet or statistical program.

Finally, if you have a Web site and know even a little HTML, point your browser to www.php.net. PHP makes your Web pages dynamic by providing HTML tags that let your page communicate back to you. This way, your online questionnaire can dump automatically into a database text file readable by your spreadsheet. The program is free, manuals and all.

Data Analysis Now it's time to rake in the results and convert the data into usable information. Your spreadsheet can perform simple averaging and other statistical functions and generate good charts. But for correlations and more-detailed analyses, turn to one of the many analytical packages available online. Two of the best for small businesses are SAS StatView (www.statview. com/index.html), which provides a free demo version, and Survey Systems (www.surveysystem.com), which offers a $49 evaluation version with a $200 add-on statistics module.