Market research question

Business
1

Hello,

I would like to service the needs of SME, find out what they seek in a web design company or what might be lacking or is there an unserviced need in the market, where would be the best place to do the market research? where small businesses hang out, so to speak.

thanks:)

2

I think you should limit your location first? Do you want to make research in your local town? Or the whole country? Or which part of the world?

3

It will most likely be in melbourne & london

4

Then it will be hard cause Melbourne and London is too far away. You might want to use 2 different companies for Melbourne and London, cause using a big company that can handle market research on both will be more expensive. Did you try Google with something likes “melbourne market research companies”, or “london market research companies”?

5

For London / the UK in general, local chambers of commerce are a useful networking point to touch base with other SMEs. Also worth perhaps discussing on the ukbusinessforums which are very active, though bear in mind many of your future competitors are also on there too.

6

As I don’t have much of a budget, I’m a lone person, I am thinking of sending out the survey myself to
small businesses in Melbourne there will probably be about 3 questions, is it worth offering an
incentive to fill out the survey? As I don’t know if I will get any replies.

7

You can’t contact companies out of the blue just like that. At best, your fax will be ignored. Have you contacted the chamber of commerce? Or the Australian Embassy? (same with UK’s)

They could guide you a bit on how to proceed and if you can send your faxes or not. Sometimes they may even have a market research already done.

If it turns out that you can send your surveys, definately offering an incentive may resul in a higher percentage of answers

8

There’s lots of websites read by small business owners in Australia (SmartCompany being one that immediately comes to mind)… I’d do online advertising rather than print or direct mail for maximum efficiency, and yes, you will absolutely need a incentive to get people to take the survey – whether it’s a trip, free iPad, or whatever.