The Idea of Creating A Focus Group for Your Business
When your business keeps growing, you need to level up our strategies for more satisfying result. You will always need to innovate to deliver new products or services that your new and existing customers will like. It is not an easy feat because you have to do deep research to find out the characteristics of the market and gain valuable data to predict the response of the market. Thus, it is a great idea to create a focus group, a team consisted of small group of people who can represent your target market where you run your idea as well as questions related to your products and services. This way, you will have better understanding and insight of how the bigger and wider audience will response from the initial.
How to run a focus group smoothly
The idea to create a focus group for your business to have successful sales is good strategy because it is more targeted and specified. Thus, the information or data you gain will also be more reliable to use. However, running a focus group can be confusing if you use this strategy for the first time. So here are general guide to run your focus group:
Decide the topic for discussion and it needs to be specific. It will hard to address every issue during discussion so narrowing down the topic is a great way to straight to the point. You can also conduct different session of discussion for different topic. For example, the first discussion is about the brand value of the product/service you are going to launch. Next session will discuss about the functionality of the products/services.
It will be easier for you to prompts your questions beforehand to prevent from swaying off the topic. Make sure that the questions are specific so you will get to the point answers as well. Prepare the questionnaire to be more organized and give some space on the questionnaire to let the participants add extra notes if necessary.
You can appoint one of your representatives to be the facilitator of the group who take note important point as well as guide the discussion itself. It is highly recommended to choose a person who is attentive and can listen well. It should be a person who has good communication and social skill.
The next thing to do is to find the right participants. This can be considered as the hardest part. You should select carefully and plan the date and time for the group meeting. You can choose participants from your existing customers. You can offer them incentives to make them interested to join such as special rewards or discounted products/services.
It is important that every participants in the focus group give their consent. You have to remind them of the purpose of the discussion and give them the consent form which states the purpose of the discussion, participant’s rights, compensation, contact information of facilitators, and sign space. Only after they give you their consent should you proceed the discussion.
