Once you choose your concept testing audience, you must gather information necessary to complete your concept testing research.
Choosing Your Audience
Earlier this week, Jeff covered the process of choosing the right audience for your concept testing research.
Once you have selected the target audience you wish to address, it’s important to take a step further and collect information which will help you develop a deeper understanding about them. This process considers not only detailed information about your audience itself, but also the existing market and your audience’s interaction with it.
Knowing Your Audience and The Problem They Wish to Solve
As introduced in the previous post, the basics of knowing your audience is really just a combination of demographics and firmographics.
Demographics tell us who a person is – their age, educational background, marital status, familial role, salary, where and how they interact with your company, among other things. Essential in a B2C setting, as well as B2B.
Firmographics are very important for B2B especially, as they define who a company is. Though you may not have specific business names, it is important to determine the size of the company you are looking for, the market they serve, and their overall needs.
Determining what combination of demographic and firmographic information is necessary for optimizing your research efforts can help you properly draft your surveys and interview questions to gather meaningful data.
When you’re familiar with these characteristics of your audience, it is easier to begin to understand how your concept could meet their needs.
Knowing Their Current Solution
To get a complete understanding of your audience, you must intimately grasp their problem – how often they face it, how inconvenient it may be, and how they are currently solving it.
Are there competitive products already available? If their current solution is a potentially competitive product, concept testing gives you the opportunity to learn why they are drawn to that product or service, how valuable it is to them, what features they like and which ones they would change, and whether they would consider switching if your concept was offered. If those products overshadow your concept, it may be best to cut and run, but if your concept has a fresh take on the problem and is ready to compete in the market, you now know you can highlight that feature and even have a great idea for a potential marketing campaign.
This is key information. Assessing the audience’s current situation helps you on the path to success – determining potential speed bumps with concept development and introduction, and formulating sales and marketing strategies down the road.
Estimating Their Impending Behavior
Understanding how your audience is currently solving their problem is vital to understanding how your concept will interact with the market. And knowing your audience individually and corporately provides a gauge by which you can measure and predict future buying behavior.
Actionable Research Concept Testing
Actionable Research has years of experience conducting concept testing research to help companies determine the potential for their concepts in a specialized and successfully-proven way. We can help you to select your audience and design research to get all the information you will need to make the big decision. If you’d like to learn more about how we can design a unique concept test for you, please contact info@actionable.com.
