Secrets of Successful Market-Research Studies

When you establish a market-research study for your business, follow these basic guidelines:

• Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query.
  
• Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all of characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population group. Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they're accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information.
  
• Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don't need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand.