Simple Market Research And Pre-Testing

[franktang00]

How many people do pre-testing of marketing materials/website media?

There seems to be a lot of great suggestions of how to track your marketing efforts, but all this happens after the fact (and after you've spent the money to publish everything)

Is Pre-testing or market research a big part of your marketing strategy? What types of tools/services do you use?

I use markiter.com. It allows me to test different pieces of media and get feedback in minutes.

Full Disclosure: Markiter was created by friends of mine, but it's been helpful to me, so I just wanted to share and hopefully others find it useful as well.

[BBlackwood]

Testing has traditionally been a huge factor in direct marketing. Usually, several different offers or mailer designs are designed and sent to a select test audience to see which is more effective.

You can do the same thing with email marketing, perhaps pulling prospects back to different landing pages to test which offer is more compelling.

[franktang00]

But that would mean you would need to fully develop/produce multiple landing pages? Would it not be easier to pre-test mockups first to get feedback on what people thought of each offer? This way, you save time by only producing offers that pre-tested well, and you can avoid sending sub-optimal offers to part of your audience.

[BBlackwood]

If that works for you, great. I've been through a lot of research though, and I promise you that what people say they will do (when in a research study) and even what the BELIEVE they will do, is not necessarily what they actually do.

Check out Martin Lindstrom's book "Buyology" for some eye-opening insight into traditional research.

[Jacksonbaran]

Hi all,
Nice topic here...
The most important thing to keep in mind is the end-user/consumer need that you're satisfying. If you understand your consumers/customers very well, you'll know what's important to them, what language they use, how they view the category, what they like/dislike about other products, etc.

I think Pre-testing and market research are particularly important to making sure everything is right before launching a product. Companies that try to short-cut the system usually fail ... and never really know why.

[franktang00]

Great comments Jackson.

What are some of the methods you use to pre-test and do market research?

[spookycc]

I worked in market research for about eight years, in the 1980's and 1990's. We dealt with small and large companies both, and did some pre-testing of products and services that were not in use yet at the time.

I think the most important thing in market research in this day and age is to make sure you carefully screen your respondents, to make sure that they're in the demographic group that your business will be dealing with.

I saw a lot of companies waste money talking to people who would never be inclined to use their particular product or service, and that's just money down the drain. No one can afford that, but most especially not now.


Colleen

[acwebguru]

Well I like your clear cut confession. But I have a little doubt about it. Gathering data about the possible of the growth of a business organization is not as simple as you might have thought. Further I fear that my competitor might get a wind of my future plan.