Resources for Audience Response

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.

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.

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.

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.

Use keypad polling for your audience surveys

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

• 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.