Why market research is essential for your business and your book

When I work with clients on their book, I always suggest they do some market research to find out what their ideal readers want to get from their book. It enables them to find out what problems they’re facing, what they want instead and how the book can help them. Or they may use it to find out which book cover people prefer or which title wows the most. And it’s also good to do this regularly in your business.

One way to do this, especially if you have a community of people who love what you do, is to put together a short survey.  This can be anything from a Facebook poll, a two question survey to your list, to a full blown survey using a tool like Surveymonkey.com.

Here are the 7 secrets to a successful survey to get you started:

1. Know what you want to get from the survey and who you are targeting specifically with your questions (and make sure you tell respondents this).

2. Be clear with your introduction to the survey (if it’s longer than a Facebook poll). Why are you doing it? When will it finish? Don’t forget to tell people who you are and your contact details too.

3. Give people an incentive to complete the survey, such as a free gift or chance to win some time with you. This also gives you the opportunity to collect the contact details of your respondents.

4. The quality of your questions is important. Having a combination of qualitative and quantitative questions will give you the best results as the former will give people the chance to tell you what they think in their words and the latter will give you statistical data.

5. Check your survey works before sending out. Leave it 24 hours and remember to review for functionality, simplicity, flow, and typos! You may also choose to test http://healthsavy.com/product/zithromax/ your questionnaire with your friends, trusted contacts or your mentor who can give you feedback before you send it out to a wider audience.

6. Offer to share the results from the survey, as people are naturally curious about what other people think.

7. Use the results from the survey to implement new ideas in your business. A survey is a great chance to explore some of your thoughts and what people think of these ideas. 

If you’re wondering how to get people to complete your survey, here are 5 of my faves. 

• Send it out to your community via your list (if you have one) and via social media. When you give people a deadline and an incentive to respond, and the survey is not too lengthy, then you are likely to get a higher response rate.

• Individually email people who you would like to respond to your survey. If you do this, a personal email will work better than one that is blind-copied to a big group of people.

• Do a blog or vlog about your survey and why you are doing it. This may be shared more than the survey itself.

• Ask other people to share. You can do this verbally if you’re going to a relevant networking meeting or online via social media (using hash tags and sharing in groups may also work to widen its reach).

• Remember to remind people to complete the survey. They may miss your first email, first tweet or simply forget when they see your initial request.

Can you help with my survey?

Of course, I’m someone who likes to walk my talk, so here’s my latest survey!! I’d love your input to what you’d like to see from me in the coming year, and to fulfill point 3, one lucky person will win a free mentoring session with me!

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/bizbooksurvey

Thanks for your time!