I need marketing advice

[sauer13]

I am looking for some decent "do it yourself" marketing data collection techniques. My partner and I are looking to get a hundred or so surveys collected as fast as possible for a project we are working on.

Spamming Yahoo! Chat won't be targeted enough, and a Craigslist ad that leads to a survey landing page may be too slow. I'm hoping that someone has some advice on ways to expedite the data collection process, and I'm particularly interested in free ways of collecting data.

Hope someone has a suggestion,

Danny

[StealYourDreams]

Elaborate please.

[jasaunders]

There are no free ways to do this, unless you only give the survey to people you know. If you are able to spread the survey to people you know and people they know, you may have limited success, but what incentive do they have to take the survey? Are you offering a reward or sweepstakes for taking it? People don't want to waste their time to help out a stranger.

That's why primary research is difficult, especially with no budget. Most entrepreneurs in this situation rely on secondary research data that is readily available because it is much cheaper and already exists, but the disadvantage is it may not be custom tailored to your needs, something you have to deal with.

[sauer13]

Thanks for your response! I have a follow up question though.

If I plan on printing up some surveys, and offered the respondents, as an incentive, an entry into a drawing to win a large quantity of the product I am ultimately hoping to sell, will this type of incentive skew the results? If so, do you recommend that the incentive be something unrelated to the end product I am researching?

I'm not sure if you need more information on the product I'm trying to research/develop, but my instincts are telling me to play my cards close to my chest on this one.

Please Critique My Strategy (If you have the time)
A plan, I'm kicking around, is to print up special business cards that boldly state the incentive as the headline, and ask that interested parties stop by a survey landing page as the call to action. I intend to leave them around town in hope that my target audience will grab them and follow through. I fear that this may be to many steps though and will limit the response rate.

[jasaunders]

Yes, you will have a very low response rate. I recently tried running a survey by handing a letter with a URL to go to, to over 2000 of our customers and the response rate was lower than 2%. People don't want to logon, open a browser, type in an address, and then take a survey, its too many steps. You have to make it as easy as possible. Additionally, its probably not in your best interest to give away your future product, especially since it might never exist. You should give away something that people want. Unless you are sure you are going to get a large sample size to your survey, your results will be meaningless. You may want to consider other options.

[AOCenteno]

Why do you think the Craigslist route will be too slow? Have you looked at Survey Moenkey? They allow you to build some powerful surveys and receive up to 100 reponses for free.

[nonnerkay]

This may sound lame but depending on how long or extensive these surveys are you could either do a txt blast or an email blast and have people foward it to their friends but be sure to ask them to send it to the origional sender (you) hope that helps

nonner kay

[remipub]

Something else you may consider, find a complementary business that has an existing client base and see if you can negociate a deal where they will give the survey to their clients. You can then control (to some degree) the class of those responding, and you're more likely to get sincere responses since the survey is coming from someone they know and have worked with. It may not be as fast as you hope, but it should give results with a higher degree of accuracy than randomly placing cards.

You would probably have to offer some kind of incentive - at least to the business with whom you are in cooperation, if not to the end user as well.