Better Young Entrepreneur

The most critical process for any young entrepreneur who wants to start a business is market research.

Market research is the process by which the marketer (you) enters the world of the customer. Market research is essential for every business campaign even if you think that you’re already familiar with your market or are even a consumer in your market (although it’ll probably be easier for you).

One of the best ways to conduct market research is via survey.

20 years ago conducting surveys sucked.

Basically, it consisted of you standing outside a competitor’s store in the mall and handing out surveys with pre-paid envelopes, hoping for some response.

Fortunately for us, those days have changed, thanks to the internet revolution.

Online surveys – get your market

There are many online survey services that offer free options, like www.surveymonkey.com, but they have their downsides and are very limited in function.

The first thing is that, to take the survey, your customer has to click a link and go to an external page. Secondly, on that page, there is the branding of the survey company all over the place, with their own links, etc.

On top of that, you’re limited in the amount of surveys that you can create as well as the number of participants that you can include.

Solution?

Enter Google Docs. Google Docs is an awesome, free service that you may have been using for years for online document management and distribution.

But, did you know that you can use it for powerful surveys?

We do this with a specific function of Docs called “Forms”.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s highlight some of the benefits of using Google Docs for your surveys.

1) Your customers can fill out the survey anytime, anywhere

A Google Form is very flexible. It can be filled out directly from an e-mail inbox (no going to an external survey website), or from a smartphone. This helps you get your results faster and is less of a hassle for the individual.

2) You can post your survey right on your website

Your Google Form survey from is embeddable, meaning that you can put it anywhere on your website with some simple HTML code.

3) You can create as many surveys as you like, and send them to unlimited people

As opposed to the free version of popular online survey services, you aren’t limited to amounts of surveys or amounts of recipients.

4) Google Docs supports logic-branching

This means that you can choose to have your survey recipients see different questions based on their answers to previous questions.

For example, you create a survey that asks for age.

Your two choices are “under 30″ and “over 60″ and, of course, you don’t want those who are under 30 to see the same questions as those who are over 60.

So, with Google Docs, you can specify for those who answer “under 30″ to see a different set of following questions than those who answer “over 60″.

How to get started

Go to docs.google.com and sign-up for a google account if you don’t already have one (which you should).

Once you sign in, click “Create New” in the upper-left side of the page and choose “Form”.

Then, you’ll have all of your options for creating your survey. You can change the look and feel of your survey, how many questions it has, etc. Then when you finish your survey, you can either send it to a set of contacts via e-mail, embed it on your website, or send people the link to the form.

What are other free online tools that you use for your business?

Sound off in the comments.

Talk soon,

Abhay “Making your life easier” Khurana

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