As a business owner or representative, you put a lot of thought into your presence at a convention, trade show, or public event. These events give you a rare opportunity to connect with others interested in your specific industry. Attending or having a table at a convention or trade show can be valuable for your business in many ways.
The exposure helps you reach clients, make connections, and showcase your product or service. Many companies leave with multiple leads that they can use to maintain visibility at a later date. One of the incredibly valuable, and perhaps lesser known benefits, however, of showcasing your business at an event is the opportunity that it presents for market research.
Market research is a sampling of your customer created by using volume and averages, then funnelling that information into categorized data to create a “type” of customer that is interested in your product or service. Thorough market research can give your company valuable information about your target customer’s demographics, spending traits, and daily behavior.
Knowing your customer is essential to growing your business. This information can help you manage your marketing campaigns, make important decisions when there are changes in the economy, and predict market trends.
Not only does understanding your customer base help you reach potential consumers, but it helps you understand your own industry with better clarity. Proper market research will give you an idea of the competition on the market, and how they are reaching customers. It will tell you what the hot items are in your industry, and how the customer feels about them. It can even help you develop new products or services which fill a need that has not been previously addressed by the market.
Conducting proper market research used to be complicated and laborious. The data covered to gather proper results is broad, and covers multiple areas. If you reach these people and are able to collect the data, you still then need to divide the information you’ve gathered into categorical results which can give you an idea of what to use the research for.
This is why trade shows and conventions offer amazing opportunities for market research in a smaller window of time. But how do you conduct proper market research with a large crowd? By asking a series of pre-set questions designed to give you the proper data. In the past, you could hand out paper surveys or polls. After receiving these polls, you would combine the data to give you different results. This requires that you separate the data into various categories to get the answers you are looking for.
In today’s day and age, we can use technology to make market research easier and faster. Computer programs have been created to collect, sort and analyze your data, making things much easier on the company looking to utilize their exposure to conduct market research. The problem with computers and laptops, aside from being expensive, is that they are bulky to transport in higher quantities, and aren’t always user-friendly. In fact, if you are trying to allow multiple people to answer questions at the same time, they can take up a lot of room. That’s why many companies today are using IPads to make mass market research easier.
Now, the IPad has multiple research-oriented apps which can ask those questions and sort the data for you. These research apps will help you collect valuable data by creating interview questions for the people you meet at your convention or trade show. The right interview questions ensure that the information received is specific and accurate, leading to accurate conclusions based on the data received.
The research apps available will sort the data for you and illustrate conclusions from that data. You can use multiple apps to analyze the data, allowing you to compare and contrast your results for an even more efficient system. You may even gather leads who would be willing to answer more in depth questions.
An IPad can be somewhat expensive, ranging from almost $200.00-$900.00 depending on the device. Thankfully, our company offers rental pricing, which is significantly less expensive than purchasing an IPad. Renting these devices allows you to offer use of several IPads at a time, therefore increasing your ability to reach more people when you are exposed to a large crowd. You can offer an incentive for filling out a series of questions, and you can have a large group at a time filling out individual answers without having to lean on your table or crowd your immediate area.
At Ipadrental.ca, we can find you the perfect rental program to fit your needs. Make sure your next convention or trade show leaves you with valuable information to grow your business by renting IPads to conduct your market research.