We all know that creating effective marketing strategies in today’s marketing world is all about understanding customers. Thus, whether you want to build marketing strategies to keep your existing customers, launch a new product or service, or raise brand awareness, you should always take a step back and evaluate your target markets properly.
When market research is conducted properly with well-designed marketing surveys, it enables companies to measure expected ROI in advance.
So before investing in marketing strategies, it is essential to conduct market research and start collecting feedback from your customer base.
In this case, you need a strategically and intelligently designed market research survey to gather the data you need, reduce risks, gain market understanding, and stay ahead of market trends.
As the quality of data collection depends on your approach to research, it is critical to design market research surveys in a strategic manner with effective research questions.
If you have some questions about this process, don’t worry! We’ve got you covered with fresh content about key points of an effective market research survey. This article will take you through a useful dos and don’ts checklist of market research surveys to help you design a survey that captures all you need.
Types of Market Research
Before moving on to the dos and don’ts of market research surveys, let’s start from the basics and explain the types of market research to have a better understanding of how market research surveys work.
Types of market research mainly fall into four categories: primary research, secondary research, and qualitative and quantitative market research. While primary and secondary research differ according to the directness of data collection, qualitative and quantitative marketing research differ numerically.
Primary and secondary research might be harder to conduct as it requires more time and preparation. In addition to that, in the secondary research process, previously collected, analysed, and published data is used. So it might not be enough to gather in-depth insights from customers.
In this case, qualitative and quantitative research provide more sophisticated data to benefit concept testing, campaign evaluation, and brand awareness research processes.
How to Conduct Market Research Surveys
Until now, we have learned the basics of market research and why it is important to create an effective market research survey. Now, it is time to learn how to conduct one.
To start this process, all you need to do is craft market surveys that benefit your marketing strategies and seem appealing to your target audience.
Crafting a user-friendly and visually impactful marketing survey that has good questions and flow is both an art and a science.
The process of conducting an effective market research survey always starts with having a clear idea of what you want to study as well as how you plan to analyse the results. Writing a good survey questionnaire requires high-quality research data and accurate analysis. The questionnaire is the heart of every survey and designing an effective questionnaire is dependent on many different factors with errors in every corner.
Considering all these factors, it is true to say that creating an effective market research survey is not as easy as it seems. So clearly, there are some dos and don’ts of this process to keep in mind.
The Don’ts of Market Research Surveys
Creating a beneficial marketing survey is all about knowing what to avoid and address. Thus, we will start with the don’ts of market research surveys. By examining this list, you can get a headstart in your market research process, learn how to create the right survey questions, and create a cost effective market research survey. Here we go!
1. Avoid Leading Questions
A leading question is one that suggests a specific answer to the participants. This question type sways the respondents to one side of the argument.
For example: “How good was your experience with our maintenance service?” In this question, even before getting a positive or negative response from the respondents, you have already assumed that the quality of your maintenance service was good.
Leading questions result in skewed responses and don’t provide you with the quality insights you need for your market research.
2. Don’t Go With Double-Barreled Questions
A double-barreled question is a combination of two or more distinct questions. Aiming for a single response for distinct questions often results in either a non-response or a response that is difficult to interpret.
For example: “Would you like our service to be cheaper or more value for your money?” In this example, two separate topics are grouped into one question. For some of the respondents, the meanings of “value for your money” and “cheap” might overlap. Hence, it’s best to avoid this question type.
3. Don’t Use Technical Jargon, Acronyms, or Abbreviations
The use of technical jargon, acronyms, or abbreviations in your market research survey tends to significantly lower the response rate as not all the respondents are familiar with complex terminologies.
Hence, you must avoid their usage unless you are confident that the participants know what they mean. However, when it’s absolutely necessary to use an unfamiliar term or acronym, make sure you provide a definition for the same.
4. Disinclude Vague Quantifiers
Collecting the right answers is all about asking the right questions and making sure that the meaning of the question is conveyed in the right way. Thus, including vague quantifiers in your market research survey might not be a good idea.
Vague quantifiers like “often,” “rarely,” and “sometimes” don’t convey a uniform meaning to every participant. So, if there are some vague quantifiers in your questionnaire, they should be replaced with a more definite range or attribute.
5. Keep Ambiguous Questions Off
It is easy to overlook these flaws in questions because at times the questions look honest and relevant. But the truth is, the vague nature of many questions confuses customers and therefore, results in poor or inaccurate responses.
Using words like “think,” “feel,” or “expect” in survey questions tends to attract different reactions from different people. Often, the range obtained with such questions is so broad that it makes the data more or less unusable.
It is important to be focused and specific with the survey questions you are asking such that the respondents interpret the questions just the way you want them to.
6. Don’t Forget to Test Your Market Research Surveys
Testing your survey before you field it is a crucial part of ensuring survey success. It saves you a lot of effort, time, and money. Also, it keeps you away from the disappointing, off-target data associated with a poorly-framed survey.
Pilot test your survey by sharing it with a few respondents or other people. The purpose of a pilot test is to let you know if your questions, language, or answering format is confusing or ambiguous. It is crucial to know how respondents are interpreting the survey questions to make the necessary changes before rolling out your surveys.
The Dos of Market Research Surveys
Now we have come to the fun part! In this list, we’ve compiled all the dos of market research surveys to help you stay ahead of the competition and provide customer satisfaction by understanding your customers’ needs and demands. In addition to that, with this checklist, you can discover how to create an appealing market research survey.
1. Introduce Your Survey With a Welcoming Message
Starting with a welcoming message helps respondents to understand the survey’s context better. When respondents understand what and why they are being asked, the response rate enhances and so does the quality of market research data.
The introduction should also include points like how the information will be gathered and analysed. Also, make sure to include a consent option or confidentiality and anonymity option in your research survey introduction.
2. Be Conversational and as Sincere as Possible
Write every survey question with clear objectives, simple language, and proper grammar. Some questionnaires are so lengthy that they end up annoying and frustrating the respondents. To avoid this problem, make sure to keep the survey questionnaire as simple as possible with precise, specific, and to-the-point questions.
Additionally, questions that seem unimportant or unnecessary to the study should be excluded from the survey. However, no matter how important conciseness is to a survey, it should not be done at the cost of confusing your respondents with poorly structured questions. So keep the language concise, but provide complete information about how to accurately interpret the question.
3. Use Scales When Possible
Scales take away the ambiguity associated with questions and help you receive easily measurable and specific responses.
For example, instead of asking,
“How good was your experience with our maintenance service,” you can ask, “On a scale of 1 to 10, please state how satisfied you are with our after service.” Giving a full range of options helps you get accurate responses that truly reflect the sentiments or experiences of the participants.
4. Make Questions Situational When Possible
Situational questions use circumstances that someone has not experienced. It is hard to prepare answers for such questions, and therefore, these questions help to decrease survey bias, if any. However, sometimes respondents face difficulty in understanding hypothetical scenarios, and hence, such questions should be thoroughly analysed before including them in the market research survey.
5. Include Enough Response Options
Including “don’t know,” or “not applicable” options in your surveys help you get the most honest answers from your respondents. Sometimes, if these options are not included, respondents feel they are being pressured to answer a certain way and they choose to opt out.
Final Thoughts on Market Research Surveys
To sum it up:
- Be sure to start your market research survey crafting process with clear goals and objectives.
- Keep the market research survey concise and relevant to your respondents.
- Avoid leading or loading question types.
- Keep the information simple and easy to understand.
- Provide your respondents with a full range of options to get the most accurate answers for your market research surveys.
Proper attention to survey format and design is necessary to receive reliable and quality information for your market research. Bolt Insight can help you create and design effective surveys to get the most accurate and useful results.
