12 Tips for Conducting Qualitative Market Research

Every business believes it knows what consumers want. Clearly it cannot be the case that every business does, so why make such a foolhardy assumption?

What separates a successful business from an unsuccessful one, often, is actually finding out what consumers want. A major component of this is qualitative market research.

The goal of qualitative market research is to build a picture of what your target demographic thinks and feels about your or your competitor’s products and brand by asking questions such as:

• What is your favourite thing about this brand?

• What would prevent you from buying this product?

• How does this compare to a competitor’s equivalent product?

Questions like these will help you build a better understanding of what customers want from your business, and can give direction to your product development and marketing efforts.

Qualitative market research can be a daunting task, so follow these 12 tips to build a successful qualitative market research strategy:

1. Know your audience

As with many other elements of launching and marketing a new product, it is essential to understand your target demographic. The basic details to start with are the age, gender, location, economic status and family size of your typical customer.

From this foundation try to build an idea of their hobbies and interests, what kind of career they might have and where they spend their free time.

While you should have a strong notion of who your customer is before this point anyway, the more detail you can come up with here the better as you will be using your demographic data to target your surveys and focus groups.

2. Know your competition

Understanding how your product stacks up against the competition is vital for knowing how to best approach your marketing:

• How do your product’s price, quality and features compare?

• What problems doesn’t the competition solve that you do?

• How do customers perceive the competition, and how can you contrast yourself with that?

Analysing the promotions, online presence and marketing of the competition should give you a feel for what works and what doesn’t, but remember that simply copying a competitor’s strategy won’t help you to stand out.

Don’t look just at what the competition is doing to get customers but also what they are doing to keep them. This is the marketing arm you will be most directly contending with.

3. Conduct one-on-one interviews

These are great opportunities to speak to potential or existing customers and get a detailed idea of what they want from a product or service like yours. Some prepared questions to open and close the interview help everything go smoothly, but don’t waste the chance to dig deeper into anything interesting they say.

4. Conduct focus groups

Like a one-on-one interview, a focus group lets you get immediate, in-person reactions to your brand. Focus groups are ideal when you need detailed feedback on a new product or marketing idea.

Focus groups have the advantage of letting you hear people discuss your brand among themselves, where they may present different or more honest feedback than they give to you directly.

5. Conduct ‘shop-alongs’

Observing real interactions with your product in a store, whether a physical shop or online via screen capture, provides invaluable insight.

You can identify issues here with in-store display and packaging that could otherwise have slipped under the radar.

6. Get user diaries

Incentivising participants to keep a journal relating can tell you a huge amount of their day-to-day experience of using your product or being involved with your industry.

Used with the participants’ permission, these diaries can also make fantastic marketing material.

7. Run targeted surveys

Focus your surveys on the target audience. Survey results from people who would never have an interest in your business will only muddy the waters. Use survey platforms like SurveyMonkey and Survey Analytics that are able to target specific groups. Facebook and YouTube are also good options due to the vast amounts of demographic data they hoard, but plan for especially short attention spans here.

8. Ask the right questions

When it comes to the questions you ask in your focus groups, surveys and interviews, make sure that the answers will enable you to draw useful conclusions that you can act on.

Simply knowing a customer prefers your competitor’s product to yours tells you nothing of use unless you also know how they feel about each product and brand, what they expect from the products and how much they are willing to pay, for example.

9. Keep it simple

If it takes more than 5 minutes or so to complete your survey, many people will simply give up before completing it. Surveys can be as short as 5-10 seconds and still be useful depending on the data you need, for example a YouTube ad survey typically only asks 1-3 multiple choice question to get simple information on brand awareness.

Similarly, if an interview or focus group goes on too long your participants will get bored and be less engaged with the process.

Existing customers are obviously an important demographic to hear from, and easy to contact via email and SMS for interview, surveys and invites to other feedback events.

10. Keep it fun

Try to make market research activities engaging for the participants. In surveys and interviews, use a variety of question styles to keep their mind active, and try to incorporate fun activities and product testing into proceeding where possible, it gives you more engaged participants who will leave feeling positive about your brand.

11. Offer an incentive

You are asking people to give you their time and help your business, so it is only fair you give them something in return. More to the point, people are much more likely to participate in your market research if they have something to gain from doing so.

A cash reward is simple and always welcome, but a smart business could try to convert participants into customers with a discount, coupon or free trial.

12. Control group size

When it comes to getting survey results more is always better (within your target demographic at least,) but if you are also conducting focus groups, too many participants can make it harder to get each individual’s opinion clearly. To optimise the amount of useful insight gained from each focus group session, most businesses use 6-12 participants per group.

Conclusion

With the right preparation and implementation, qualitative market research gives your business unparalleled insight of consumer attitudes and the current state of the marketplace. The defining aspect of a well-executed qualitative market research strategy is that it generates actionable information that informs product design, marketing and to an extent even the strategy of your business as a whole.

Qualitative market research plays an important role in building a better understanding of what customers want from your business. However, it might not be that easy to conduct it. In the following post, you could find 12 useful tips to follow when doing your market research, which will help you to see the right direction of the further business development.