We're the only WBENC certified woman-owned small business with a market research focus in Georgia. Every day we counsel brands from privately owned companies to start-ups and billion dollar multi-nationals on custom designing marketing research surveys. Collecting data using a quantitative online survey has been critical for many of our clients to gain statistically significant data that identifies actionable insights whether for a brand tracking study, annual customer satisfaction/NPS, or understanding a new market segment and its customers—just to name a few.
While we work on marketing research studies day in and day out, we recognize that most don't and best practices might be helpful for the planning stages.
Since the insights captured are only as good as the marketing research survey design, here are a few tips to ensure success with gathering the right data and insights with your next study!
1. Identify your marketing research learning objectives.
Having clear learning objectives ensures that the data captured will support your study's goals. Having goals guides and helps prioritize the questions that should be asked. It also provides guardrails for limiting the addition of just one more question (a common refrain we hear)!
Here’s an example marketing research learning objective:
The Brand Attitude, Awareness, and Usage (AAU) study will provide customer insights and quantify market awareness, the general attitude toward the brand and usage of it, along with perceptions around its competitors.
2. Include an incentive for marketing research study's respondents.
Depending on the size of the universe you’re tapping into (e.g., a customer list of 1,000 or 290,000), incentives help ensure strong response and completion rates.
Here are two examples of potential incentives: One is to offer participants entry into a drawing for a $300 egift card. Another is to offer the first 100 research respondents a $20 gift card. This second option helps create a sense of urgency in taking the survey.
If you're tapping into a panel, the incentive will be provided to each respondent and will should reflect the time asked of the respondent, as well as their title or level.
3. Use everyday language with your survey design.
Questions should be clear and succinct. Upon reading a question and the corresponding answer choices, the respondent—the person taking the marketing research survey—should very clearly understand what is being asked.
If needed as a point of reference, define terms or explain a product’s concept. For the most part industry jargon and technical terms should not be included in a survey, nor should your internal company lexicon.
4. Ask customer demographics / business profile.
For a B2C study, you might want to know a consumer’s age and household income or for a B2B one it might be helpful to understand the business profile, such as their revenue or marketing budget. Plan to capture these seemingly confidential questions at the end of the survey. Including them is essential if you’re looking to cut the data by company size or age of respondent.
5. Consider survey length and time to complete.
Be mindful of the length of the survey. Bottom line, don’t let a survey get too long. The longer the survey, the higher the incentive should be. Without that, it will lead to abandonment, and if you want to ensure you reach a certain sample size this is critical. Expect better completion rates with shorter surveys. In general, we tend to keep online surveys under 15 minutes.
6. Deploy a mix of closed-ended questions.
While sometimes with marketing research open-ended questions are valuable, they can take longer to answer and don’t provide quantitative data.
We recommend the majority of questions be closed-ended. This means having the questions include a choice of definitive answers to chose from, such as rating, ranking, multiple choice and checking boxes. These are easier for people to answer, ensure they actually complete the questions and provide quantifiable data.
7. Ensure research question relevancy.
Not every person who answers your survey should receive every question. Rather they should only receive questions that are relevant to them! With skip logic, the way a person answers a question determines the next question they receive.
This also helps up front, with the screener, to ensure that only the right people (qualified based on pre-identified criteria) access your survey to complete it.
8. Avoid leading questions.
It is easy to ask a question in a way that provides a bias for the person answering it. When working on your marketing research survey questions, be sure the questions are neutral and will not influence the responder to choose a particular answer choice.
9. Focus each question.
Make sure that each question really is only one question, and not a double-barreled question—one that touches on more than one issue.
Here’s an example of a double-barreled question: “How satisfied are you with your payment processor and point-of-sale mobile device?”
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