One of the most important things you need to do before creating a new product or service is understand the market demand for it – if you don't you could be wasting your time and money in developing it and then finding no-one buys. There are a number of ways to determine market demand including surveys, online forums, PPC advertising and analysing your website and sales statistics.
Surveys
If you already have a customer base, you can survey them using online technology or using something as simple as a paper based survey that you mail out to them.
When developing a survey, ensure you have a variety of questions (short answer, multiple choice, single choice etc) and a maximum of 5-8 questions. The survey shouldn't take any longer than 10-15 minutes to complete otherwise the opt-out rate will be higher (i.e. they won't complete it).
For online surveys, one of the best tools available is SurveyMonkey. This tool allows you to send free surveys to up to 100 people or for more features and responses, you can pay US$19.95 (approx AU $22) a month and cancel the subscription at anytime.
Online Forums
Across the world hundreds of thousands of people are participating in online forums, posting questions about how, what, why, where and what they should do about almost any topic you can think of. This provides a gold mine for businesses to research the need for products and services.
One of the easiest ways to search forums is via Group search. Go to your web page and open Google. You will see a small link at the top under 'More' called Groups - select Groups and then enter your search query.
For example, Mary of ACME Fashion Styling wants to know what other people want to know about fashion styling for body types so she enters: advice body type fashion in the Groups search engine. The results bring up only forum results for this search type.
PPC Advertising
If you don't already have customers, you could create a pay-per-click (PPC) online advertising campaign or advertise in an eNewsletter asking people to complete a survey in return for something related e.g. an eBook, a free report, a downloadable podcast. See PPC Advertising for further information.
This would require an investment of advertising funds and has the potential to be less targeted i.e. for PPC anyone on the internet could complete the survey who aren't really in your target market because they just want to get the free item. One way to alleviate this is to segment your responses into your target market and those outside your target market by using a survey with demographic questions e.g. location or gender.