Three Tips to Use Facebook for Market Research

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Who are your target customers and what do they want? How big is your target market? These are critical questions for any business.  For start-ups, they can inform whether the business is viable and be necessary to secure funding.  For businesses of any size or maturity, they can inform activities from product development to marketing planning. However, traditional market research techniques used to answer these questions can be expensive and even challenging if a market is new or niche. If you are looking for alternative (cheap and easy) options to research your market, here are three creative ways to leverage the Facebook account you probably already have.

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Check out these exciting new options for market research

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An understanding of customer demand is critical for small and large businesses to grow profitably. Market research can build this understanding, but, in the past, many market research options were time consuming and expensive. They typically involved hiring a market research company to conduct focus groups or surveys using a customer panel or buying large datasets from a syndicated data supplier. And, they didn’t always offer a good solution to the specific questions that a business was trying to answer. Now, new technologies and ideas like crowdsourcing are driving innovation in the market research landscape and promising to disrupt the status quo.

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Three steps to making CSR count

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It has become widely accepted that investing in corporate social responsibility (CSR) makes good business sense. A study by Accenture found that 78 percent of executives see social responsibility as vital to the future growth of their business, and corroborating statistics abound. Whether companies view CSR as risk mitigation or value creation, it is easy to argue that doing more good is better for business, or at the very least does no harm. However, a study published by Michael Barnett (Rutgers) and Robert Salomon (NYU) debunks this logic with data that show that doing more good can actually do harm for some companies.

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Make "offline marketing" work for you

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With the buzz around social media and the opportunities it provides to reach and interact with customers, it’s easy to lose sight of seemingly old-fashioned marketing tactics. However, those tried and true practices can still provide unique benefit, particularly for reaching business customers. Take direct mail, for instance. You’ve probably noticed that you get less mail than you used to. This is no different for your business customers. One estimate is that the average businessperson receives personal mail only once every seven weeks, while they receive in excess of one hundred emails a day.

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Do you know who your target customer is?

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Having a clearly defined target customer is critical to making your business successful. It can inform all aspects of your marketing, including product and packaging innovation, communications, channel management, pricing, and promotions, and ensure that your marketing is effective and efficient. But, many businesses (small and large) approach customer targeting as an afterthought. They wrongly assume they can (or should) appeal to everyone or think about targeting only in terms of basic attributes like demographics.  Defining a customer target does not have to be a complicated nor expensive process.

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