Free online surveys for field (primary) research

Market research is the process of gaining information about your target market, this is focused on key information about your customers and the key factors affecting their buying decisions. There are two types of market research. Field (primary) research is work you carry our focused on understanding the need of your potential customers and desk research is published information. Both areas are essential to fully assess new businesses opportunities and determine its commercial viability.

Field (Primary) research usually results from direct contact with your customers and potential clients. This generally involves carrying out interviews with your potential customers. This information is generally obtained using a survey or focus groups. When starting to plan your field research, you need to think about the following issues, How do I find my target customers? And what is the best method of obtaining feedback and their opinions? Also what type of questions do I use when communicating with them? and how do I understand and analyse the results?

One potential method is to target online discussion groups who contain potential customers and use online surveys. There are now a number of websites (Zoomerang and SurveyMonkey) offering you online surveys these websites let you create your own customized surveys and get feedback. Surveymonkey has a free service which provides the basic method to create an online survey that you e-mail to your potential clients or set-up a link on your own website. This is a great tool for evaluating your new idea, it has enough features to produce a survey with different types of multiple choice questions and also text boxes to get feedback for your questions. There is also a more detailed PRO plan version which has a monthly subscription which allows you to customize the survey using your own logo and pictures, use free expert templates and download the results to pdf or Excel share and easily share the results of your surveys with your coworkers. Zoomerang also offers both a basic and paid annual subscription service. It also provides user templates and has a very user friendly user interface to create surveys. Also Zoomerang reporting features are very easy to understand and visualize.

Using either of these online surveys will give you insights of how you’re potential customers perceive your new products and service. More importantly this feedback will give you an insight into the demand and the market potential; this is a reality check on how well your new idea fits the market needs. You should think carefully about proceeding if you obtain a negative response in your survey. However, the information you obtain will help you to develop more effective new business ideas.

To learn how to carry out your own research attend our workshop Practical market research: test your business idea.