Author Archives: Ivana Taylor

In a previous article, I showed you how to find a target market for your product or service.  Today, I’m going to show you how to use QuestionPro to segment your market and identify those powerful psychographics that will help you build a great relationship with your customers and sell more stuff.

Create a customer email list

QuestionPro has some super-nifty customer survey tools that you can use to build a killer customer database with very little effort.  It all starts with a good customer email list.

You’ll want to create a master market spreadsheet that includes your basic customer data; first and last name, email, top products purchased, etc.  I’d also recommend that you create a field that has some revenue ranges or designations i.e. < $5, ooo annual sales, $5,000 – $10,000, etc. , sales regions, industry, etc.  This will prove to be crazy useful later on in the process.

There are a couple of categories of knowing here:

• What you know (from the data you have)
• What you need to know (in order to segment or target)
• What you want to know (so you can make decisions)
• What would be nice to know (so you can wow them)

It helps to make one list of items you want to know — and then categorize them as: Have, Need, Want, Nice — so that you can break out your survey questions accordingly and strategically.

Start with some profile surveys

When I’m doing customer research, I like to run a single demographic survey.  I know that it’s more common to tack on those demographic questions at the end, but I find that I can’t have all the demographics that I want and that respondents are weary by the time they get there and they skip it.  So I run a single demographic survey to fill in the gaps between what I have in my customer database and what I need or want to know to run a marketing campaign.

If you’ve done a good job creating your spreadsheet, you’ll notice that you probably have more demographic info than you thought you did.  So now, you don’t need to ask redundant questions.  Just ask the demographic questions you don’t have data for.

Upload your email list and run the survey

Now take your email list and run the demographic survey to the list.  Of course, a lot of folks won’t answer, that’s where the reminder feature of QuestionPro comes in handy.  You can manually send reminders or have the system send automatic reminders just to the people who haven’t responded to your survey.  You’d be amazed at what a difference it makes in your response rates.

Upload demographic data to your master marketing spreadsheet

Once you are done with that phase of the survey, upload the demographic data you’ve learned to your master marketing spreadsheet.  Another option is to upload this information into your CRM.

Psyhographics are fun and useful

Now you’re ready to run a quick survey around psychographics.  Psychographics are your customers values, personality and lifestyle questions.  The best description of psychographics is that demographics give you the “who” and psychographics give you the “why”.

Here are some examples:

1. What are their names, ages, genders, occupations, family details?
2. What are their interests, habits, hobbies, and pastimes?
3. Who influences them? Religion? Politics? Strongly held beliefs?
4. Where do they go for information?
5. Where do they shop, eat, hang out?
6. How do they dress?
7. What concerns keep them up at night?
8. What kind of cars do they drive?
9. What is their relationship or potential relationship to you?
10. What do they want from you?

Again — only pick the most important ones that will help you understand your audience and create a tight target audience.

Once you have this information, add it to your master marketing spreadsheet or CRM.

Tedious but tremendous

I know — this is ridiculously tedious.  But the payoff in understanding your target market is priceless.  Now, if you have a few extra dollars to spend and you have a customer base of over 1000 people, you might consider investing in a customer panel using our MicroPanel platform.  This is a system that will automate this entire process and really bring you into conversation with your target market.  But if you’re on a limited budget, you’ll only have to invest a little bit of your time and sweat to achieve similar results.

“Everyone can use our product/service!”  If you’ve said anything resembling this sentence, this article is for you.

I know, you think that if you limit your market that you’re limiting your sales and nothing could be further from the truth.  You can’t be all things to all people and even if you could, you can’t sell and service all of them.

You will have to choose and I’m going to give you some creative ways of finding and choosing a target market.

If you have customers

If you already have some customers and it feels like they are “all over the place”, then you will have to see which of the customers you have are your ideal customers.  I have a couple of interesting ways to do that:

1. Profile your customer – The intention behind the profiling is to spot any patterns that you may not have noticed as you were accumulating customers.  It might help to do this as a spreadsheet and use the following designations: Product/Service, Geography (local, out-of-state), Revenue, Industry, Products purchased, Customer source (advertising/referral) etc.  Notice that these categories are demographic and psychographic in nature.  You can make these categories anything that you wish.  
2. Note any patterns -   You are looking for patterns.  Take a look at your list and perhaps tag the ones you love working with the most.  Now look and see each of your profile categories to see if they share any similarities; were they all referrals from the same person, maybe the same event triggered them to call you (this is a an overlooked differentiator and target market identifier).
3. Dig deeper - If you’ve found some similarities, start digging into that specific pond or pool to see if there is a significant segment there.  For example, one of my friends is a financial planner.  After a few years of being in business she realized that a lot of her clients were women who were going through a divorce.  Today, this is her target market and her brand.  She is THE go-to planner for women going through divorce.

If you don’t have a lot of customers – starting out

1. Check the competition -  Look to see who your competitors are targeting and who they are ignoring.  Let’s look at my example of the financial planner targeting women going through divorce.  You could target MEN going through divorce.  See what I mean?
   
2. Match your benefits/outcomes to potential customers – Make a list of features, benefits and outcomes of your product or service and then describe the person or company who would most desire that specific benefit or outcome.
3. Target a trigger – Think about the moment or event that would trigger someone to want or need your product or service and focus on that moment.  We’ve already talked about divorce, but there are so many more, new baby, moving, getting married, becoming an empty nester, going on vacation — the possibilities are endless.

Don’t be afraid of choosing

The main thing in identifying a target market is to NOT be afraid of choosing.  Remember, you are NOT ignoring other potential customers, you’re just not targeting them.

How can online surveys help you target your customers

I’ve told you all of this because QuestionPro’s online survey tool is a powerful partner in helping you identify and build a relationship with your ideal customer. If you haven’t done any segmentation, then you can use QuestionPro to identify some of these hard to ferret out psychographic attributes that your customers have.

You’ll want to do these surveys in phases because doing one large and long survey will not only overwhelm your customers, but will overwhelm you as well.

After you’ve done some of the work we’ve talked about here, you’ll have a good starting point with which to survey your customers.

I just sat there with my mouth gaping open.  That’s all I could do at the time — other than fret about the very real possibility that some VP was going to come storming into my office and fire me on the spot. 

Interest doesn’t equal action

This project started out like any other; an exec comes into my office and asks me to run a survey to see if there was any interest in our customers wanted their products processed and packaged a certain way.  That was it — was there an INTEREST.  This is the operative word here.

I created and ran a survey — using my professional market research firm.  We were perfectly clear on the objective, we created questions, launched a phone survey and received the results.

There was an INTEREST.  What I didn’t count on was the executive taking that report and those results and using it as justification to build a multi-million dollar facility on the basis of interest alone.

Do I need to tell you what happened?  You already know.  Interest doesn’t equal intent or action.  It’s only interest.  Interest means that they would consider hearing or learning more.  That is all it says.

How to make sure your survey is used properly

At the time, I was a young pup.  I did what I was asked to do and delivered the results.  Oh – and I didn’t get fired either, but I learned several valuable lessons from the experience nonetheless.

1. Elaborate on the objective.  The objective tells you what the survey will deliver, now elaborate and make sure that you discuss what it will NOT deliver.  Our objective was to gage interest.  We delivered on that.  But the survey would NOT deliver on action.  From that moment on, I made sure I discussed, and noted what the survey results will deliver and NOT deliver so that we can all be clear.
2. Outline the safe USE of the results.  Your survey results are a product that contain inherent risk in its use.  Treat it as such.  Don’t be afraid to outline exactly how the data can be used – and how it should NOT be used.  We live in a time where people have to be told NOT to use their lawn mowers to trim hedges.  Believe me, you need to state the obvious.  It might be obvious to you, but it isn’t obvious to the third or fifth person down the line who gets their hands on your data.
3. Insert conclusions in headlines :  This is so very important and no one does it!  When you have a data chart, the headline should be the result – the conclusion of the chart “2013 sales up 35% over 2012″ and NOT something like “2013  sales”.  This accomplishes several important things with your survey report 1) It frees up the audience from doing unnecessary math and digressing from the conclusion of the survey and 2) It gives you the opportunity to state the conclusion of the survey over and over again – eliminating potential data interpretation hazards.
4. Insert Warnings where required:   These days all products have warning labels “Do not use hair dryer in bathtub or shower” for example.  Your data should have warnings wherever you feel that folks might feel the need to get creative with the interpretation.

So there you have my most embarrassing survey moment and the lessons I learned from it.

How about you?  Do you have a story like that to share?  What happened and what did you learn from the process?  Share your tips!

Have you ever thought of using your QuestionPro online survey tool to test a new concept for a web site?  I hadn’t ever really thought of it — until just yesterday.   That’s because I’d forgotten about all the new feature advancements such as drag and drop questions that make it super easy to test out my web site copy and concept.

So today, I’m going to show you a real example of how I’ve been using QuestionPro to test a new small business panel that I’m creating called SmallBizOpinions.

What triggered the idea to use QuestionPro to test my Web Site copy

Here’s what happened.  I had a web site design selected and I had already written and gone through several rounds of copy editing.  But I still wasn’t completely sure that the copy was clear enough and that it would engage my target audience (small business owners) enough to take action and join my survey panel.

I was going to ask a few small business colleagues and friends to look at the site and I wanted to get their feedback.  But my challenge was making sure that they would give me feedback I could do something with — and making sure that I kept them focused on exactly the areas that I wanted to tweak.

That’s when the lightbulb came on — I mean normally, I would use a quick survey to collect feedback!  So why not do that with QuestionPro?!  Well, at first, I thought it would be challenging importing all the pictures and the elements of the site — but when I thought more about it — I realized that it wasn’t has hard as I thought.

The Challenge – Is my concept clearly understood by the target audience?

The first thing I had to do was take a moment to understand what my objectives were — I didn’t want feedback on the design — that was settled.  What I wanted was to show them elements of the site and make sure that they understood what I was saying — and if they didn’t understand it, I wanted them to tell me what was missing.

A-HA — now that I was settled on that, the rest was fairly straightforward.

I took some screen shots of the web page concept and then inserted them into my survey —  Here’s what it looks like:

If you want to see it in action — just click here:

http://questionpro.com/t/AS9BZPPPj

My favorite feature in this process was the “Drag and Drop” question type.  I was able to pull each paragraph from the web site copy and then ask people to drag and drop them into the order that they’d like to see it in.

Why use QuestionPro to test web copy instead of user testing?

There are tools that allow you to test web sites and user experience, but this is a little different.  I don’t want to test how easy it is to navigate the site – I want to test how clear and effective the copy is.  And this is what made QuestionPro the obvious tool with which to do this.

Why not use A/B testing to test your copy

The traditional way that we test the effectiveness of web copy is by doing what’s called A/B testing.  There are tools that you can use to do that such as Unbounce or Web Site Optimizer by Google.  But quite frankly – I don’t have the technical skills involved to do that.  I have a concept design and some copy.  So this is why I chose QuestionPro for this.

What do you think? I’d love to get your comments, suggestions and feedback about how you might use QuestionPro to test your web copy.