1. Market Research
Entrepreneurship

2. Defining a Market Audience
Think “Mean Girls” … if you were to make 5 categories of students that attend your school, what would they be?

3. Defining a Market Audience
Choose one of your five categories and answer the following:
What makes these kids “tick”? What kind of people are they?
What kinds of hobbies do they have? What do they enjoy doing most?
What percentage of them make up your school?
Where do they live?
Where do they shop?
Where do they work? Hang out?
What do their parents do for a living?
Do they read/interact with your publications? Why or why not?
What kinds of social media outlets do they use?

4. Defining a Market Audience
You just defined a market audience!
A group of people that a business or organization needs to understand in order to create a marketing and sales strategy to solicit their attention and monetary business

5. Defining a Market Audience
Why is this important? To know ...
How to engage your audience
What kind of businesses to solicit for advertising in your publications
How to plan coverage so the audience cares
Which social media outlets are essential
How to sell your publications to your audience, especially yearbooks

6. Defining a Market Audience
How is this accomplished?
Surveys
In-Person — Members of the marketing team can go to the audience and verbally ask them about their preferences
Electronic — The marketing team can solicit responses through Google Forms, Survey Monkey, or social media
Printed — Paper copies of surveys can be distributed en masse in a large group setting and tallied later
Metrics
Website data — Use Google Analytics or other types of metrics to determine which features are used most often and by whom

7. Survey Construction Surveys are designed to discover …
Who the audience is (demographics such as age, location, etc)
What the audience wants (likes, dislikes)
Preferences the audience has (what is going right, what is going wrong)
Suggestions the audience has (what could be changed or improved)

8. Survey Construction Surveys should be … Quick to complete
Done in one seating in 5-15 minutes
Easy to answer with select-response questions
Examples: multiple-choice, checkboxes, circle responses
As unbiased as possible (write questions carefully)
Do not lead your audience to particular answers!
Both open ended and specific
Limited to 1-2 pages
No staples. Keep it simple.
Able to be summarized/explained in 25 words or less; need a point!

9. Survey Construction Process Write and critique several drafts
Distribute to a pilot/focus group for evaluation
Edit based on feedback
Distribute to a sample size of the market audience (at least 10%)
Tabulate results
Determine trends
Draft a market audience profile
Recommend a course of action for the business or organization
Test the course of action
Update the plan based on continued market audience feedback

10. Working With Data Examine the results carefully
Tabulate responses graphically and determine what percentage of the market audience identified with each category and question presented
Draw conclusions that are consistent with data presented
Determine if any questions did not yield accurate results because of bias

11. Working With Data Types of Bias
Wording — The way the question is written may lead to certain answers (leading questions)
Omission — A possible viewpoint or critical issue may have been ignored
Internal — Early questions might influence the target audience’s responses to later questions
Extremes — Give target audience only extreme possibilities for their answers and ignore ambiguity

12. Working With Data Follow-Up
Consider constructing a second survey to go deeper into specific issues raised by audience responses
Avoid being narrow-minded and only looking for results that support your pre-survey hypotheses; make decisions based on what the data actually says
Use data to determine next steps for public relations, marketing, sales and distribution strategies