Market research is typically conducted by organizations to inform product development and go-to-market strategy to ultimately drive business growth. Below is SurveyMonkeys agile market research framework. A lot of things can inadvertently bias your survey respondentsthe wording of your question, the sentence structure, how you choose your answer options, and more. In this guide, youll learn everything you need to know to conduct your own market research from start to finishfrom creating a project plan to designing your survey to collecting representative responses to turning results into action. The market research standard is 95%. When presenting your research to stakeholders, business context helps you answer the so what? questionwhy your research matters, why stakeholders should care, and how the findings/recommendations can help the business. How you summarize and visualize your results is important for understanding and communicating your findings to stakeholders. Learn how many people are aware of your brand plus how and when they heard about it. Create & send surveys with the worlds leading online survey software, Empower your organization with our secure survey platform, Bring survey insights into your business apps, Collect survey responses from our global consumer panel, Understand & improve customer experience (NPS), Understand & increase employee engagement, Create marketing content from customer feedback, Collect, review & manage applications online, Win more business with Customer Powered Data, Build a stronger workforce with Employee Powered Data, Validate business strategy with Market Powered Data, Delight customers & increase loyalty through feedback, Improve your employee experience, engagement & retention, Create winning campaigns, boost ROI & drive growth, Elevate your student experience and become a data-driven institution, Best practices for using surveys & survey data, Our blog about surveys, tips for business, & more, Tutorials & how-to guides for using SurveyMonkey, Everything you need to know before getting started. Your time to shine! Cant find what youre looking for? Seasonality can affect some brands more than others, and you might want to take that into consideration when running market research studies. Below are some guidelines for how to make it easy to spot those valuable insights. Learn what tech brands and apps are most popular among millenials, 1. The reality is that most teams are given a set budget for the year and need to figure out how to work within it. When surveying your customers or followers isn't right for your survey topic, use SurveyMonkey Audience to find the people you need. See how BridgeCare Finance incorporated powerful stats into their investor pitch deck to secure company funding. Agile market research is an approach to conducting market research in which projects are structured in small, frequent sprints so you can adapt to challenges on the fly. The key with these types of questions is balancing the number of positive, neutral, and negative answer optionsthere should be equal parts positive and negative. It can mean different things to different people and be viewed through a number of different lenses. Use this Market Research Framework to define the activities required to successfully create, plan and execute a market research plan. The order in which you do things here can make a big difference in how your roadshow turns out: One of the best ways to ensure your recommendations are implemented is to hold your team and stakeholders accountable with follow-up. In order to do that, you need to know who your target audience is to begin with. Qualification rate (a.k.a. Or, maybe its clear what you should do, but you need to convince the right people. This includes your project budget, who youll be surveying and how, and the estimated project timeline.

Note: If you made your open-ended questions required, its possible that the respondent didnt have an answer for the question. Try to answer the following questions before getting started: Not to worry, well go into much more depth on how to answer these questions in the fielding section of this guide. A survey measuring millennials usage of video streaming services. Since the main thing youre trying to measure is how results change over time, you want to avoid any other confounding factors that might impact the difference in results between waves. When your story is falling flat, step back and see if your presentation is not just answering the what and how, but also the why. There are three metrics you should be aware of: A low completion rate indicates something may be wrong with your survey because few people who begin the survey actually finish it. We get this question a lot: But arent I skewing my data by removing responses? The answer is that if the responses are low quality (i.e. Here are some sample size recommendations: Margin of Error is an indicator of how closely the survey results from your sample represent the entire population youre targeting. Now, getting buy-in for your recommendations and motivating others to act can be a challenge. It may mean youre asking two questions in one (double-barreled questions), which could make the results unusable. Our recommendation: Offering a survey incentive is another way to improve your response rates. Ask yourself and your stakeholders these questions: Finally, pull your stakeholders into your follow-up research plan. Use this market research framework to define the activities required to successfully create, plan and execute a market research plan. : age, gender) in your survey sample and is specified when you target your audience. Market research is essential to every organization. That way, you wont end up with only female small dog owners instead of a balance of male and female small dog owners. Now, lets say you dont want to target the general population, but you have a more specific target in mind.

If youre having trouble coming up with the right answer options, SurveyMonkeys Answer Genius can help by using artificial intelligence to predict the answer options you should use for a given question. ways to ensure reliable results. If youve got an always-on survey, like a survey embedded in your website, then you dont ever want to close your survey. Make your question wording as clear and simple as possible, and if you must, explain what technical terms are with examples (either within the question itself or in a survey introduction). How to design a successful market research survey. Once youre done reading, youll be a pro at conducting your own primary market research. When you are measuring something at the top of the marketing funnel, like brand awareness and favorability. Understand your target markets behaviors, perceptions, and needs. Join our community of200,000+ professionals from companies like Amazon, American Hospital Association, Microsoft, US Bank, Marsh, Sunlife, 3M, Toyota, Texas A&M University, Pfizer and many more. When your product/service category appeals to the general population. When youre sending out a market research survey, your ultimate goal is to understand the behaviors and perceptions of the target population youre interested in. If your respondents dont understand what youre asking you may end up with bad data, so dont assume they know specific terms. Lets be realistic: We all have to work within a budget. Its up to you as the interpreter of the results to determine if that statistical significance is important. : incidence rate): the percentage of respondents who make it through your screening questions and go on to take your survey.

According to the latest global market research report by ESOMAR, a global community of market researchers, roughly $45 billion is spent on market research annually around the globe. Its important to understand how targeting options and screening questions work together. Where you stand with budget will likely determine how you move forward. Test company, brand, or product name ideas before launching. Its best to time your project based mainly on your project goals and research plan. Even when youre targeting a narrower group of people, you want to ensure the proper demographic balancing. Firmographics: industry, job title, job level, etc. The research roadshow is pretty much what it sounds like: a series of meetings to present your findings and recommendations to the right stakeholders to motivate them to take action. Note: when you use SurveyMonkey Audience to collect targeted responses, our system will monitor your completion rate. Think about some of the best presentations youve seen. Statistical significance is useful in market research when applied to differences between respondent groups (e.g. Including an other or none of the above or never answer option can help you achieve this. Yeah, right. Download the research brief template here. So, the conclusion here is to wait until youve received all of the responses you ordered and your survey is closed to begin your analysis. One way to do this is by peppering in quotes from your open-ended responses.

Trick question! Our team of Audience experts are here to help you get your project off the ground. The feasibility of your sample can determine the max number of people you can survey at a given time. Sometimes your survey logic will influence the number of people you need to survey. When results start flowing into your survey, your first instinct is to start combing through the early data, but be careful! All you have to do is customize the survey template for your product/service category and youre good to go! Find a targeted group of people to survey. We also know that older female demographic buckets tend to fill up before younger male demographic buckets. Neither time of day, day of the week, seasons, nor holidays really make a difference for data quality. Survey scientists have found again and again that they cause desirability bias, the tendency for respondents to agree more often than they normally would.

Now its time to figure out what the results mean so you can turn your in-depth data into actionable insights. Market Research Decision Problem Template, Training Course: Marketing Communications, eWorkshop: Marketing Research Benchmark Study, eWorkshop: Keeping Our Seat at the Table: A Marketing Report Card. Hooray! Check out SurveyMonkeys integrations with digital gift companiesan easy way to offer incentives for your survey. See all market research survey templates, or check out our question bank when you create your next survey. It breaks down the anatomy of a good market research survey. Statistical testing is commonly built right into survey software. The results are in! Rooted in the Agile Methodology first introduced in the software development space, agile market research takes on a lot of the same characteristics youd find in startup culture. Youve done a lot of digging into your data, and while a lot of the findings may be interesting, they might not all be relevant to your story. There are two ways of targeting a narrow population like small dog owners. You did it! Youre more likely to get higher data quality when respondents are unaware youre using a screening question at the beginning of your survey. Transform insights into strategic business recommendations. As you continue to do more market research, keeping stakeholders involved will improve the effectiveness and actionability of your research. A survey methodology summary should contain: This study was fielded using SurveyMonkey Audience from June 20-June 22, 2019 with a U.S. sample of 1,013 adults age 18+. Its important to set up the story to ensure everyone is caught up before you present your findings and recommendations. Now is the time to revisit your business questions and research goals. Whether you offer an incentive depends on your budget, but when you use a survey panel, the respondent incentives are included in the price of the responses. We did a study on research-backed content consumption and saw that 42% of people found data visualized with charts, graphs or infographics more enjoyable to read than data written out in a sentence or presented in a table. Should the project scope determine the budget or vice versa? If the change is greater than the margin of error, its likely a statistically significant change. Using custom screening questions. Not really. With a margin of error of +/- 5%, you can be confident that between 45% and 55% of the target population is aware of your brand. ), and who the key stakeholders are for the research (typically those responsible for business decisions). That way, only small dog owners take your survey. For example, you could use targeting options to specify dog owners, and then use a screening question to weed out large dog owners. This change of +3% is within the margin of error of +/- 5%, which means we cannot conclude that the brand awareness has grown between the two waves. While there isnt a perfect formula, there are several fundamental things to take note of before you get writing: Now that weve reviewed how to structure your survey, lets look at strategies for writing your survey questions in a way that ensures you dont bias your respondents. Here are six things to keep in mind as you craft your data story: By now youve become very intimate with your research, but, of course, not everyone youll present it to will be. In this section, well teach you everything you need to know about writing an effective market research survey. They typically come in the form of a 5-, or 7-point scale, which means they include 5 or 7 answer options. How to use a Top 2 Box Score in your survey analysis. Data labels, as either values or percentages, Dates where applicable, especially for trended charts, Report overall positive sentiment on a question, Demographic segments, like gender and age groups. How to collect survey responses from the right people. Customize &rebrand our tools to save time and look brilliant. Balancing refers to the distribution of demographic buckets (e.g. In our dog food example, lets say the product is specifically for small dogs. But what if you could cut out the middleman and do it yourself? Essentially, what this translates to is deleting or filtering out responses from people who dont meet your criteria or havent thoughtfully answered your survey. Speeders: respondents who completed your survey way too fast. Data quality can be attributed to many things, but optimizing your survey design is one of the most important (and controllable!) Act on customer feedback at scale. While in some cases this step might not be necessary to make final decisions, its a great way to get executive exposure for your work and teams strategy. if youre certain the respondent didnt take the time to answer your questions carefully), then removing them will improve your datas reliability. A good rule of thumb is to have no more than 3 research goals so you ensure your survey is focused and not overwhelming for respondents. If youre looking for an extremely specific type of respondent, the panel youre working with might only have so many in their inventory. Luckily its pretty easy to avoid if you adhere to these tips. Well dive into all of these recommendations in more detail in this chapter. For example, if we only had a targeting option for dog owners, but you wanted to survey small dog owners, you could use a screening question to disqualify dog owners whose dog is over a certain weight. When youre not sure who your target market is and are looking to define and segment the population who is interested in your product/service. Choose from pre-profiled targeting options. What makes them stand out? You want people on your team to be on the same page and telling the same story as the research gets shared. See whats most important when making a purchase and how your brand performs. If theyre similar, youre good to go. 2. If the data that supports your story isnt a big statistic, try reframing it. Geographic segmentscountries, regions, states, etc. In this case, you probably want to target category purchasers, or people who have already used your product (or perhaps even your competitors product). More people take surveys during the day than at night. And with your plan all set, youre ready to start drafting your survey! In most cases, you have some way of contacting them to invite them to take your survey. Jargon, industry-specific terms, acronyms, and slang have no place in a survey. To start, take a look at the below diagram. Heres what the awareness results look like from the first two waves. As SurveyMonkey president Tom Hale described in his piece in Quirks, The era of doing a couple of large, set-in-stone projects a year is gone. When your objectives are clear, the next step is to outline your project scope. After all, not all of us can be brilliant visionaries like Steve Jobs, who famously said, It isnt the consumers job to know what they want. We beg to differ. Things to consider when figuring out your budget: Knowing who you need to target with your survey and how you plan to do it will have implications for how you resource your project (both dollars and team members working on it). Market research is the process of collecting information on consumers behaviors and preferences, category trends, and/or competitive intelligence. Each research phase fundamentally asks the following questions: The key takeaway here is that with the right tools and processes, research can be an ongoing activity that any team in your organization can own. If you sent your survey to your own contacts via email or social media, its possible your data isnt balanced. Storytelling frameworks can help you come up with an outline for your presentation. Research briefs are a great way to keep everything in one place. Weve got a few suggestions for how you can go beyond the insights to craft a story, develop clear recommendations, and get buy-in from leadership. Will I be able to get responses from the people I have access to fast enough? Involve cross-functional stakeholders. If you are surveying your own contacts, theres a little more to do to make sure you get all of the responses you need. Write-ins like none, n/a or misspellings arent a sign of poor data quality. Once all of your results are in, its time for a quick cleanup to make sure that youre only analyzing high-quality survey responses. Two strategies that weve seen work well for our clients are 1) Going on a research roadshow and 2) Creating a follow-up plan. Looking at how individual segments of your population answer your survey is one way to uncover insights that could be critical to your analysis. Now, that doesnt mean that you should just start conducting research willy-nilly. If you want to know what features to prioritize in a marketing automation software, best to survey marketers. Market research panels, like SurveyMonkey Audience, offer a way to access people you wouldnt otherwise be able to reach. The U.S. Census is a great source of this informationsee the table below. Alternatively, would an online panel have the people I need to reach? In addition to that, more and more companies have taken a page from the worlds most innovative companies to make their market research more agile. : building a scorecard), reframing stats wont work. You might follow the above timeline for the first run, but future projects could be done on the fly in a much more accelerated timeline (perhaps even just days from start to finish). How youll be using your results can help determine your sample size. For example, you might want to assess the impact of an ad in a specific geography or DMA (designated market area). Usually the answer is a memorable story. : stat testing) to know for sure. First, preview your results with your immediate team to get support and feedback. This will bring your data to life and make your points that much more compelling. Also, avoid agree/disagree questions. Before you get knee-deep in survey design and data collection, its important to have a clear plan in place for your market research. Compare consumer appeal and preference for each ad design, 1. Only include the results that contribute to or add color to your story and recommendations. Population size: the size of the entire group youre interested in (e.g. Market research can help companies answer questions like: Sure, business decisions can be made based on gut instincts alone, but doing so comes with high risk. Also, dont bother randomizing if it makes more sense to arrange answer options alphabetically (e.g. If your samples demographics do not match the populations you might consider weighting your results. And remember: if you get stuck, our team is only an email away! What is the estimated price of the sample? Essentially, the only thing you. Strategic business recommendations take your findings from Oh, thats really interesting to Now what? But, in order to get people on board, you have to make sure your recommendations are realistic and aligned to the overall business strategy. The fivestages of this market research framework include: Call 1 (866) 277-7275to get pricing forUNLIMITED ACCESS to the world's largest library of practical tools & training for Marketing teams. Learn how to run your own concept testing program. Tracking things like market trends, consumer perceptions, brand awareness, and competitive intelligence can provide valuable indicators that companies need to adapt to. Before you begin writing survey questions, its important to know how to structure a good market research survey. If you want a tighter margin of error, youll want to survey a larger sample size.

Essentially, it tells you how confident you can be in your survey results. Starting a market research project from scratch can feel intimidating. The good news about DIY market research and online panels is that they are much less expensive than traditional full-service vendors.

Okay, so this is a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg scenario. We have several market research survey templates to help you get started. A survey tracking awareness and perception of sparkling water brands. A baseline is your first set of results. How does my brand stack up against the competition? When choosing a sample size for your market research survey, heres what you need to consider: Are you doing a quick gut-check, making a strategic business decision, or trying to get your results published? Will you need any services, or will your team have capacity to do things like survey translations for international studies and data analysis? Confidence level: tells you how reliable a measure is. Youll start seeing responses in minutes. Agile market research goes beyond just being faster. Capture the entire brand funnel from awareness to consideration to loyalty. One framework you can follow is SCQA, first introduced by Barbara Minto in her book, The Pyramid Principle: Logic and Writing in Thinking. This will help us calculate the total number of survey invites to send so you get the total number of completed responses you ordered. Earlier in the year (or planning cycle), you might have more unallocated funds to work with, but as the year goes on, things might get tighter. Weighting involves custom calculations with a statistical software to fix any lopsidedness in your sample by giving more weight to underrepresented groups and less weight to overrepresented groups. In this guide, youll learn everything you need to know to run your own market research programs and get insights to help everyone at your company make business decisionswithout costly middlemen. The results are in, you have your findings, and now you need to figure out what to do next. Quantify the demand for your product, and pinpoint which market to enter next. This is the moment youve waited for!

Understanding how long each step in a market research project takes will ensure you start the work early enough to have actionable insights before you need to make your decisions. Alternatively, you can use calculators to do your own stat testing on groups of results. Shopping habits: primary grocery shoppers, stores shopped at, etc.

5 Survey-writing mistakes you didnt even know you were making, Survey design guidelines for our Audience panel, How to identify and reach your target market, U.S. Census Bureau, Age and Sex Composition, 2010, A guide to using screening questions in your survey, When to use a monadic versus a sequential monadic survey design, Survey data cleaning: 7 things to check before you start your analysis, 7 Filtering techniques for getting better data, The Pyramid Principle: Logic and Writing in Thinking. Sample size: the number of respondents that you surveyed. If youre a data nerd like us, its easy to get sucked into the data abyss and lose all sense of time and space. Behavioral segments like frequent category purchasers. Even still, your budget will play a role in the number of responses youre able to collect. If you follow the SCQA framework, this will come naturally. When you want to ask location-specific questions. Survey panels will also do a lot of the work for you, like recruiting a diverse population to join the panel, inviting the right people to take your survey, incentivizing respondents, and monitoring your completion rate. The frequency of your survey waves depends on several factors: how fast your category is moving, how easy it is to reach your target market, and your budget. At this point, you should know exactly how youre going to answer your main questions, so your analysis can be focused and efficient. For the purpose of this guide, we will be focusing on primary research. Here is a summary of the pros and cons of DIY market research and full-service market research for you to consider when deciding how youll conduct your research: Now that youre well versed in the different types of market research, its time to get you off and running! But if you dont thats okay too. This is because once you exceed the 50%-mark, youre talking about the majority. Youll want to monitor your survey as its gathering responses so you can (a) make sure you get results on time and (b) detect any potential issues with your survey. But the types of projects youre running can make a big difference in how you collect that data: In our sparkling water brand tracking study, we decided on quarterly waves. Heres the timeline you can expect for a large scale DIY market research project. Here are a few segments of your sample you could look into: Once you know what segments could be interesting to dive into, there are two ways to approach segmenting your results for deeper insights: Important note: When segmenting your data, be aware of the base sizes you end up with. Consolidating your results in this way makes it easier to: When you first get your survey results, youll likely looking at aggregated answers for the entire sample you collected. Is this a one-off project or a recurring tracking study? For example, if you launched the survey early in the morning on the east coast, youll likely get a lot of responses from the east coast before the west coast. Tuesday mornings). Make a plan to regroup with the team as needed to check in on action items. Agile market research isnt a brand new concept, but it has spread like wildfire. But savvy online panelists have caught on to the fact that failing a screening question means they get kicked out of the survey (and therefore, miss out on the incentive). If youre using our Audience panel, all you have to do is sit back and watch the results roll in automatically. When youre measuring something at the bottom of the marketing funnel, like purchase intent, satisfaction, or loyalty. It visualizes a cyclical approach to exploring, testing, validating, and optimizing strategieswhether theyre ideas, concepts, campaigns, you name itall the while continuously tracking progress. No matter where you work, you can always tap into the markets opinions and preferences to be better at your job. The data collection method (i.e. As a general rule, the margin of error gets smaller as the sample gets bigger. Lets get to it! With SurveyMonkey Audience, we have already asked our panelists questions typically used for targeting a survey sample: Check out the targeting options we have available for your next market research project. If youre using a full-service research vendor, are there any additional agency fees? Doing your own market research is much cheaper, faster, and not nearly as difficult as you might think, as long as you know what youre doing.