The solution to the question of How much does market research cost? depends.
It depends on many and varied factors. Such as the number of questions, the difficulty to enter a quality sample, the answers we need, the hypotheses we need to test, but fundamentally the size of the sample we want to raise and whether we are in a consumer or industrial market.
But for me, 3 are the most determining factors in terms of cost:
Whatever the case, the price range can range from a few euros to hundreds or even thousands of hundreds.
Fortunately for you, you are more likely to have a small company or a small company and thus only need to get responses from a minimal or smaller sample.
In this circumstance, you can conduct market research yourself with a minimal budget.
Let me cut the roll and get to work.
Here are several ways to continue minimize market research costs by doing it yourself.
How to do market research if you don't have a database
The cost of a market research depends absolutely on the factors that we have mentioned. In spite of everything, the most decisive thing in general is the database or the sample of the statistical universe towards which we are going to direct the survey of our study.
In the case of not having our own database, we can do two things.
- Buy it from a third party
- Take advantage of your contacts on social networks to send it
- Or create it yourself
Let's see, if you have the advantage of having several social media accounts with different followers such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook or LinkedIn, you can always appeal to the good faith of your followers and ask them to respond to a survey that you prepared yourself.
The simplest way is to use Google drive to design your survey with the advice of this post to design the questionnaire.
It is absolutely free. And it won't cost you anything !!!
Now a little trick.
If you are concerned that your subscribers' responses to the survey are too low, then give a gift to the first 5 who respond or draw a trip for two.
This will be the total cost of your market research. The cost of your gift.
How to conduct market research by buying a database
In case you do not have contacts or followers on social networks, the best thing to do is buy a database to do your market research.
My recommendation is that you trust:
Because? Because this service hyper-economically solves the 3 factors that add higher costs to market research: they provide you with a segmented database, an integrated form design and submission system, as well as the opportunity to perform data analysis. quickly and easily.
Ok, the cost is higher than when I presented the first alternative. But the results are also generally more professional.
How to do market research by creating a database
I love this alternative. But I tell you, this is the one that will take the longest, so throw it away if you already need your market research.
It is also not entirely cheap. This requires you to be able to maintain and blog, where you have a user registration form like we do in Intelligence Papers.
The rest is simple, use Google Drive to launch your survey by sending it to registered users on your blog.
It has the advantage of having a hyper-segmented sample and responses that are highly relevant to your business. Regardless, it can take months or even years to attract enough people to send the survey to.
If your only goal is to do market research, I recommend that you do not start a blog.
How to do market research if you already have a contact database
In case you already have a database to do your market research. Subsequently, you just have to concentrate on designing the questionnaire and selecting the platform from which you are going to send the questions.
For this, you can choose between:
- Google drive
- Survey monkey
- Limesurvey
Google Drive and limesurvey are absolutely free and you can create your question banks at no cost.
Survey monkey it is a payment platform but much more advanced. It has different plans and prices and in some of them it integrates the opportunity to perform data analysis with SPSS.
Either way, I think the most expensive plan costs around $ 800 a year and you have great tutorials to design your questionnaires to perfection.
If a budget of € 800 costs you dear, the other two alternatives will be more than enough.
Alternative methods for conducting market research
Is there another way to conduct market research?
Yes, there really is a way to take the pulse of the market or study the market: active listening or SmINT
It is not a perfect substitute for market research and may provide less comprehensive information, but it does have an advantage:
And is that active listening can be done continuously and allows you to know what potential customers want or are looking for and even your main competitors.
The main difference from market research is that active listening is carried out continuously and without interruptions, while the observer is absolutely neutral and does not affect the behavior of the respondent from this dynamic. It occurs in a market research.
At the same time, the costs are very low.
Usually just being registered on social media and opening a Spundge account is enough to activate a winning active listening strategy.
This strategy is based on 4 points and goes beyond the nature of a market study:
- Selection of topics of interest
- Choice of keywords for each topic
- Automated social media monitoring
- Information analysis and interaction with users
It is a great alternative for those who want to be aware of trends in their industry and want to attract customers on social media.
Either way, it's not a perfect substitute for market research, but it's pretty close and has some obvious benefits.
I hope you liked this post about how to do market research while keeping costs as low as possible and, if so, share it on your social networks.
