At some point in your business venture you may decide to expand the products or services that you offer. Every business faces the challenge of growing and increasing profits. Before you invest money developing a new product, you'll need to find out how your customers will respond.

Focus groups are a great way to get a real customer response. But how can you be sure that the results of your focus group are completely honest and not influenced by other members of the group? Audience response systems are one of the best ways to get the objective marketing results you need. Audience response systems work well in group settings for several reasons:

1. They encourage the research group to remain attentive and actively participate in the market study.
2. Allows you to gather the information you need and understand your target audience's point of view.
3. The group can respond anonymously without giving in to group influence using a keypad poll.
4. The audience response system gathers all of the data needed for analysis and reporting.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Provide guiding questions

Store the questions you plan to ask in the audience response system before you begin the audience polling. The answers you receive are what you need to determine how your target audience feels about your product idea.

I recommend: Take a look at Catalog Success for tips on creating probing questions for your focus group.

Gather a demographically similar group of people

Include people in your focus group that are within the same age group, gender and share a similar attitude about your company and its products. This will get you the best audience response results, and you can explore certain questions or responses more in-depth.

I recommend: Use a tutorial like Know This which can help you get more insight about your customers perceptions about your product or service.

Analyze the audience polling results

Using an audience response system will allow you to prepare a detailed report based on your focus study results. With most systems you can use a USB memory stick to download polling data right to your PC where it can analyze and chart the results in order to create a comprehensive report.

I recommend: Contacting companies like option technologies and ComTech that provide audience response systems for sale or rent, and additional information about how audience response systems can benefit a company's marketing strategy.

Use keypad polling for your audience surveys

Keypad polling systems are wireless voting machines used for audience surveys.

I recommend: Audience polling equipment, including keypad polling systems, can be found at Advanced Software Products and Reply Online.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  If you plan to rent audience response equipment, make sure to get a price quote in writing. Do not rely on an over the phone price quote.
• •  Make sure your price quote includes any additional costs such as shipping or travel costs.