All You Have to Do is Ask Your Consumer

I spent a good bit of my time last week helping our outbound team do some market research for one of our expansion stage companies, and designing a call script for them. Our aim was to understand the needs of the company’s prospective customers, if they were using a competitor, and what they were really looking for in a product.

The call script took on the role of a survey. Only by writing it well could we gather the data we needed to inform our influence marketing strategy. So, we ensured that the questions were clear and to the point, and could provide us with distinct data points, which we could later aggregate to derive higher level conclusions. The key was to ask. If we didn’t ask something, we would never know it!

This brings me to the first and foremost step in conducting any market research study: Decide what you want to know from your consumers, prioritize what you need to know and then simply ask. You may be trying to understand your target market, or may be wondering how to attain better competitive positioning with your product, price your product, or promote your product; whatever it is, your questions will only be validated when you have confirmation from your target consumers. Until then, your questions and thoughts will remain as assumptions.