What is a Consumer Research Panel, and How Can it Help?

What is a Consumer Research Panel, and How Can it Help?

A consumer research panel is defined as a group of individuals brought together with the express purpose of providing opinions, insight and feedback on products and services. In simple terms, a consumer research panel is the participating audience in market research campaigns.

These panels are used in a wide variety of campaigns, including those on advertisement research, product testing, and other initiatives that require the input and insight of a target audience.

Panel members are selected to represent either a particular group or the general public, with panels made up of tens (and sometimes hundreds) of thousands of people. Businesses can then segment the panels based on certain criteria and demographics to ensure they’re reaching the right audience with their questions.

Consumer Research Panels: Why Do They Matter?

Thanks to the internet and social media, sales channels are becoming increasingly saturated, with consumers bombarded by messages and offers morning, noon and night. With this in mind, businesses are now, more than ever, searching for marginal gains in order to outmaneuver the competition.

And while products and services can share price points and features, consumer research panels can help business owners understand a key intangible when it comes to standing out from the crowd: customer experience (CX).

For example, if your competitor is operating under the (false) assumption that their product or service is meeting their customers’ needs, quality consumer research can help you set your business apart and establish it as a market leader.

The goal of these panels is to actively listen to — and act upon — meaningful insights from your target audience. When you understand how your product or services makes them feel (good or bad), you can make the necessary adjustments to position your offering more effectively.

How is a Consumer Research Panel Put Together?

Consumer research panel participants are often recruited via online channels. Participants are then organized based on certain factors, such as gender, age, location, profession, and personal interests. The more information gleaned at the recruitment stage, the better, as it allows you to target an incredibly specific and targeted audience.

Usually, participation is incentivized – with panel members receiving rewards in exchange for their time and insight. Rewards can range from cash and gift cards to money-off vouchers and points, which can be redeemed against products or services.

Once a panel has been formed, research can be conducted. Questionnaires are sent to a select group of respondents designed for a particular target audience.

How Does it Differ From Other Types of Customer Research?

A consumer research panel gives you the opportunity to evolve your ideas, involving the same target group throughout for feedback on your iterations. This helps you ensure that you’re moving in the right direction as you make changes to your product, service, brand or message. 

Using a panel is, therefore, in stark contrast to focus groups or other one-off surveys. These tend to be “once-and-done” endeavors, where you receive feedback in isolation, based solely on what’s put in front of the group or survey recipients at the time. 

This can make actionable insights harder to come by, especially if you’re unable to reconvene the focus group or reach the same survey respondents to gauge their opinions on the changes you’ve made.

What Are the Benefits of Using an Online Consumer Research Panel?

Online consumer research panels allow you to efficiently connect with target market segments, collecting valuable feedback in the process. This method of research has the following benefits: 

 

  • Higher response rates from motivated respondents: Panel members are often highly motivated to respond as they’ve opted-in to take part in the research. This can result in a higher quality of feedback.
  • Current insights from a representative audience: When maintained properly, a consumer research panel offers an up-to-date picture of your audience’s thoughts and behaviors. 
  • Quicker and lower cost: Consumer panels can deliver faster insights at a lower cost when compared with other research methods – especially with focus groups, which require time and expenses to run, thus taking longer to coordinate and screen respondents.
  • Feedback can be implemented faster, too: The data received from online consumer panels can be analyzed quicker, with trends and patterns spotted and sorted with just a few clicks. This means that if there’s an overriding consensus that something isn’t working, you can change it quickly before it’s too late.
  • Anonymity means nothing’s off-limits: The online nature of a consumer research panel means you can freely ask questions regarding sensitive information, including sexual health and activity, alcohol and drug use, relationship status, and other questions on private matters. 

What Are the Drawbacks of Consumer Research Panels?

Unfortunately, online consumer panels aren’t all sunshine and rainbows. They do, in fact, have some clear and obvious drawbacks, which include: 

  • Small sample sizes and limited availability: Depending on your industry and target market, you may experience difficulty in finding respondents due to age, location, or lack of internet access, all of which could skew your data. 
  • “Bad eggs” can derail your research: There are certain types of consumer panelists who can throw your research into disarray. From bots and fake accounts to professional survey takers – who are more interested in completing your questionnaire in record time than delivering accurate insights – consumer research panels can suffer from a lack of transparency and data quality if managed poorly. 
  • Online survey fatigue: Chances are you won’t be the only one trying to reach your target audience with a questionnaire. Online surveys have never been more popular, but this level of popularity can lead to jaded recipients simply ignoring or deleting your invitations.
  • Risk of panel dropouts: Using the same panel for months on end won’t guarantee that it’ll stay intact. Participants may drop out over time, meaning the quality and accuracy of the feedback could be affected.
  • Lack of clarification or follow-ups: Other, more qualitative methods of consumer research will often involve a trained interviewer, there to prod and probe a respondent into expanding on an interesting point or observation. This is lacking from online consumer panels, making it difficult to clarify what someone meant if their feedback is vague

Examples of Consumer Research Panels in Action

As we touched on earlier, there are a number of ways in which a research panel can be used in pursuit of valuable insights and game-changing feedback. Here are a few examples:

  • Product testing: Some research panels can be incentivized to provide feedback in exchange for an early look at a new product – so long as they provide an in-depth response based on their first impressions and overall experience. This is particularly useful pre-launch, allowing you to gather feedback and make improvements. 
  • App onboarding: Similar to product testing, you can use a research panel to test the onboarding process for an app or piece of software. This will put your interface at the fingertips of the very people you hope will use it post-launch, giving you a vital glimpse into their experience and enjoyment.
  • Ad testing: Marketing companies and digital agencies can use consumer research panels to test the impact of a particular advertisement or campaign, ensuring that it makes a connection with the target audience and encourages them to take action.

An Alternative to Conventional Consumer Research Panels

Used properly — and with a reliable and vetted panel of respondents — consumer research panels can help your business gain a competitive advantage. At least, that’s the idea. Because, as more and more companies are discovering, consumer panels are on the downswing. Those drawbacks we mentioned above are becoming more prevalent, making quality feedback harder to find.

Here at Pollfish, we don’t use panels of professional survey takers. Instead, you benefit from our market research methodology by sourcing real people who are online right now. We let you survey people who are going in and out of applications, through our partnerships with publishers. It’s a randomized yet targeted survey distribution method, and you reach verified respondents who have real insights. 

With over half a billion people in our network, we never have to worry about data quality. We can simply remove those bad eggs and retain only the best, most authentic, and most useful information.
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by Pollfish Marketing Team

How To Run Market Research For Your Startup

How To Run Market Research For Your Startup

Market research is a vital component of any business; it is especially indispensable for startups, which are notorious for carrying many risks. For instance, startups have a dismal rate of failure in 2020: a heaping 90% of new startups fail. Unfortunately, this is but one of the many other grim statistics these companies face.

Luckily, startup companies that conduct market research have a major leg up in their field. That’s because market research is a wide-spanning strategy that allows businesses to glean an array of insights. This includes findings on their competitors, customers, potential customers and the sector/niche at large.

In this article, you’re going to learn how to run startup market research for your company to stay ahead of the game and preempt failure.

Where to Begin on Market Research for Startups

Given that market research is an umbrella term, it’s common to be uncertain as to where to begin. It may seem that with market research websites, tech platforms and the mighty Internet itself, market research is information overload. It’s just another headache-inducing task that will produce few results.

That’s where you’re wrong.

Knowing where to start conducting a viable market research plan is key to garnering essential business knowledge, and the results can make or break your startup.

The first undertaking of doing market research is, well, discovering if there’s a market for your product or service. Many entrepreneurs evade this critical first step, as it may seem too obvious.

Or, you may feel a tad too complacent with your offering, deeming it abundantly innovative or useful, so much so that it doesn’t need to identify a market to which it belongs.

That’s a major misstep. You must always first identify the market you belong to. Only thereafter, can you determine your precise target market and continue with your market research. Most importantly, the market you identify can help you learn if your product or service is in demand. If you have too niche of a market, you will want to amplify your marketing efforts to bring more awareness to your niche and increase its profit-reaping potential.

Understanding Your Market

Once you’ve identified which market your product or service falls under and whether it’s worthy to branch into, you’re going to need to have a solid grasp on your market. This is not a “one and done” task, as market trends and marketing strategies across markets evolve with the times. Sometimes these changes occur in a matter of days.

Understanding your market, or more specifically, your niche, will help catapult you towards success. This is the bulk of market research and it involves relying on a swath of different sources.

There are two types of sources to observe in your market and niche, and in market research as a whole: primary and secondary sources.

Primary research

is research that you generate yourself, usually directly from the customers. This type of firsthand information is crucial for understanding your buyer personas and segmenting your target market. We’ll analyze primary research later in the article.

Secondary research

is the research that’s already been generated from a variety of sources and made available on the internet, trade magazines and other literature.

For the purpose of understanding your market, niche and competitors, we’re going to focus on secondary research.

You ought to accumulate as much secondary information as possible if you want a clear picture of your market. Here are the secondary sources you should turn to when running your market research on your market itself:

  1. For the latest trends within your market/niche, obtain trend reports from credible sources such as Google Alerts, Google Trends and Keyhole. These are keyword-based tools that can help you identify trends via:

      1. Finding the latest blogs, news, videos and search terms for free (Google Alerts)
      2. Monitoring search terms and drawing data on users searching for the terms for free (Google Trends).
      3. Overlooking keywords, topics, social media handles, URLs and mentions for a fixed price.
  2. Next, gather all the necessary statistics on typical personas within the market, buying habits, conversion rates and more.
    1. US Census Bureau and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (public market data)
    2. Research agencies: Pew, Forrester and Gartner for a wide span of market reports
    3.  Industry content sites (news and blog sites particular to a niche. Ex: Ars Technica for tech and IT; Mashable for tech, culture, science; Product Hunt for sharing and discovering new products; etc.)
  3. Then, study your competitors closely.
  4. Identify direct and indirect competitors:
    1. Direct competitors: Businesses with products/services that closely resemble your own and can substitute yours.
    2. Indirect competitors: Businesses with relatively similar products/services, but cannot fully substitute one another.
    3. Find the potential weaknesses in your competitors’ offerings, or learn how to use their strengths to improve your own.
    4. Parse through their websites to understand their pricing, customers and content.
    5. Research their sales channels and social media.
    6. Use specific tools for competitor analysis (SEMRush, Nielsen, Klue.com, etc.)
  5. Finally, store all the findings on your market (the specific niche, and competitors) into an organized and comprehensive document such as a presentation for current and ongoing reference. This is going to be your market knowledge base.

Understanding Your Customers and Potential Customers

Now that you have aggregated a slew of research within your industry and competitors, it’s time to do a deeper delve into your market research. This latter stage is all about your customers: current customs, those in a nurturing stage and all other potential customers.

That’s where primary sources come largely into play. We’ve covered secondary sources and how they can help you research your overall market, but now, it’s time to understand your target market.

A target market is a group of people that a company targets as the primary buyers of their product/service. This is the group on whom a company focuses all of its marketing initiatives. This is the main group of a market, as it is the one most likely to make purchases and become loyal customers.

There are two types of primary sources: exploratory primary sources and specific primary sources. Both of these are necessary to render a clear understanding of your target market.

Here is how to continue your market research by investigating your target market:

  1. Preface the makeup of your target market via the secondary research you’ve conducted in the first half of the article. This will give you a general sense of who your target market is.
  2. To fully understand your target market, switch to primary sources to understand the full scope of your target market and cater to them the right way.
    1. Run exploratory primary research on your target market. This involves conducting:
      1. open-ended interviews over the phone or in-person
      2. surveys with a small amount of respondents
      3. surveys that cover the entirety of your target market

3. Identify issues and potential opportunities to study within your target market.

4. Use these topics to narrow into the specifics of your target market with specific primary sources.

    1. Create surveys that focus on specific segments of your target market.
    2. Focus on questions aimed at solving points of friction or problems

Closing Up on Setting Market Research in Motion

Aside from understanding your customers’ preferences, needs and problems, it is of utmost importance to first understand them from a demographics perspective. As highlighted in Step 1, you can gather some qualities about your target market from secondary sources. But it’s only a primer and far from giving you the full picture.

Surveys, on the other hand, give startups a major advantage over secondary data and even other primary sources such as focus groups. This is because you control all the questions you collect on your subjects. This includes demographics data such as age, location, gender, education and income level, ethnic background, marital status and more.

A twofold market research tool, surveys also grant you access into the minds of your target audience. Again, this is because you are in control of conceiving all the questions about your target market.

Understanding what in particular your customers’ desire and how they generally think will empower your market research efforts and business in general to stay ahead of the curve. It will assure that you know how to properly market to your customers.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team

Market Research Guide for Advertising

Market Research Guide for Advertising

Although a major subsector of marketing, advertising is often treated as a secondary task, one with a scarce backup of data to deliver outstanding ad campaign results. To add insult to injury, a sweeping 76% of marketers in 2020 did not rely on behavioral data for ad targeting.

This is dismal news, given the fact that despite being barraged with 1,700 ads per month, users only view half of them. It occurs in the face of a costly worldwide ad expenditure, which is forecasted to reach $375 billion by 2021.

Market research is therefore undoubtedly necessary. A wide-spanning umbrella term, it refers to collecting and analyzing data about your target market and your competitors, along with the traits, trends and changes in the overall market you serve.

Consequently, it is evident that advertising requires its own market research. This guide will teach you how to carry out market research for advertising.

Advertising Market Research at a Glance

Advertising market research is a form of research concentrated on advertising campaigns. As such, its ultimate aim is to identify the most effective ads within a company’s target market.

The process of market research for advertising includes pre-campaign efforts as well as post-campaign scrutiny. This includes setting up advertising campaigns, narrowing in on your target market, deducing which ads are best and measuring the success of your ad campaigns.

You’ll find that market research plays a critical role in each stage of this advertising development process. Let’s get a more thorough rundown to learn how to set up an effective advertising campaign through market research tailored specifically towards it.

Pre-Campaign Market Research: Setting Up Your Ad Campaign

We caution you to never jump headfirst into an advertising campaign. Before running a campaign, you must set it up through planning. Pre-campaign efforts include three stages, all of which are fueled by market research.

Here are the first three stages:

Stage 1: Acquire a deep understanding of your target market.

You cannot lay the groundwork for an ad campaign before you understand who your target market is, along with the different segments it encompasses. By understanding these groups, you’ll be able to create general ads that target the entirety of your target audience, along with ads tailored more towards the different segments within your target market. Here is what you will need to nail down both of these groups:

  1. Set up a survey that covers a wide net of demographics. Ask questions to gauge which demographics show the most interest in your brand.

  2. Determine which demographics show the most favorability towards your brand, offering or messaging. This is your target market.

  3. Arrange psychographic surveys across the demographics most conducive to buying from you. This will give you direct insight into the psyche into specific demographics, revealing the different segments within your target market.

Stage 2: Set Up Micro and Macro Advertising Campaign Objectives

Now that you’ve nailed down your target market and have zeroed in on the different segments within it, you can begin planning your advertising campaign. Each campaign, sub-campaign and ad itself will require an objective.

Otherwise, you won’t know how to measure the performance and success of each component of your campaign(s). Here are the objectives to focus on and how to do so:

  1. Pin down the purpose of a new campaign. Or do so with a number of campaigns. Typically, an advertising campaign seeks to:

    1. to inform your target market about a new offering.

    2. to persuade consumers to convert (either by buying, subscribing, signing up for the new or existing offering).

    3. to remind your target market where and how to access the offering.

  2. Find the proper media channels to deliver your advertisements. Think about the purpose of your campaign; can a particular channel deliver it best, or perhaps, can it do so partially?

  3. Collect secondary research on your target market. This will help you discover which advertising channels work well across general target markets.

  4. Collect primary research by creating surveys that unveil the messaging preferences of each segment of your target market.

  5. Narrow down the advertising channels for your campaign. These include:

    1. Display ads (landing pages, pop-ups, banners)

    2. Social media ads

    3. PLA ads (via Google Adwords or Criteo)

    4. Native Ads

    5. PPC

Stage 3: Set Up a Budget for Your Advertising Campaign

The shortest stage within the advertising research and development process — although not trivial in the slightest — setting up a budget is necessary before you do any conceptualizing.

Market Research During the Campaign

Following the first three pre-campaign, pre-planning stages, we move along to the campaign itself. Now that you’ve done the market research on your target audience, set campaign and sub-campaign objectives and set a budget, you can start conceptualizing the operation itself.

Here is how to proceed:

Stage 4: Create the Central Messaging Behind Your Campaign

  1. Decide on a concept; it can be a theme or a central narrative to all your ads.

  2. Make sure your idea is precisely targeted to your target market, along with the segments of your target market.

  3. Next, create the ads themselves. An ad should possess the following qualities:

    1. Relevance to the target audience

    2. Value in purchasing and using

    3. Uniqueness to set yourself apart from competitors

    4. Credibility — your customers should believe your ad, don’t make it seem too good to be true.

  4. Get into the nitty grid of your sub-campaigns and ads themselves

    1. Decide which channels you chose previously work best for which ad type

    2. Decide what to incorporate into each medium (ex: do you need a video in each medium or only copy, etc.)

    3. Based on the surveys you’ve run, decide which ads to expose to particular segments of your target market. You can add more surveys for research purposes.

    4. Set a frequency, ie, how many times your audience will receive your ads

  5. Launch your advertising campaign

Post-Campaign Efforts

Market research doesn’t end after you launch your advertising campaign. Its performance gives you another great opportunity to study your target market, along with your ensuing marketing efforts.

It will also inform your new campaigns and new ads as part of your current, ongoing one. This brings us to the final stage.

Stage 5: Keep Track of Your Advertising Performance

Tracking the effectiveness of an advertising campaign will differ based on the KPIs you set. These will depend largely on the medium you use to distribute your ads.

  1. Attribute several KPIs to monitor during your campaign. Here are some to consider:

    1. Conversions

    2. Return on Ad Spent (ROAS)

    3. Cost Per 1,000 Impressions

    4. Impressions

    5. Cost per click (CPC)

    6. Click-Through Rate (CTR)

    7. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

  2. Observe these KPIs daily on a web analytics platform like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Or, set up your campaign and track it on a specialized platform like Adroll.

  3. Create surveys that target the same segments from your campaign. These can help you see how your customer base reacts to them.

    1. Test them on images (preferences on 1 over the other).

    2. Ask them questions to expand and refine the current campaign.

    3. Come up with questions for new campaign ideation.

Closing off on Market Research for Ads

After Stage 5, you should have established a familiarity with your target market and your industry — at least to some extent. With all this data in tow, you can go about new ad campaigns armed with this new customer knowledge. More importantly, the market research you’ve picked up during this process will help inform all of your marketing efforts.

After all, the purpose of this research is to equip your brand with a deep understanding of your customers to make smarter business decisions. After gathering enough market research, you may try going bold in your next advertising venture.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team

Americans Divided Over a Coronavirus Vaccine: Over 50% of Survey Respondents Say Employees Shouldn’t Get Vaccinated

Americans Divided Over a Coronavirus Vaccine: Over 50% of Survey Respondents Say Employees Shouldn’t Get Vaccinated

Developments on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus (Covid-19) have been in the works worldwide, even before the current pandemic had first hit China this January. In the US, vaccine testing has been making the rounds for months, as a fourth large-scale vaccine trial has recently entered phase 3.

With all the developments surrounding a Covid-19 vaccine, Americans have been on the edge about its implications. These include its legality, efficacy and effect on many aspects of daily life. Consequently, we at Pollfish conducted a survey on the coronavirus vaccine in an effort to unearth how Americans truly feel about it, chiefly in regards to its probable mandate by the US government.

As such, the survey delves into the various issues the vaccine can present, and our findings represent the thoughts of Americans of various age groups, education levels, employment types and other demographic categories. You can access the full survey here. Let’s dive in.

Scarce Confidence in a Vaccine to Soon be FDA-Approved

First things first. We wanted to discover if Americans believed a Covid-19 vaccine would soon come to fruition — legally and with FDA approval.

23.82% of respondents were unconfident that an FDA-approved vaccine would arrive in the coming months, which span the remainder of 2020.

With almost a quarter of Americans skeptical of a coronavirus vaccine to be approved in the first place, it is objective to conclude that Americans believe that the current pandemic state will carry on in some part for the rest of the year. This means lockdowns, partial lockdowns and oscillation of new cases.

This statistic also points to a lack of confidence in a new vaccine. This is rather unsurprising, given that past vaccines for the coronavirus have failed phase 3.

Over 50% of Respondents say that employers should not require their employees to be vaccinated against Covid-19.

Specifically, 50.05% of our respondents were against an employee mandate to get inoculated with the vaccine. This amount represents the largest percentage out of all the other questions, meaning this notion has the greatest support. The slightly past half agreement on the issue (which is considerate) comes into opposition with another study run by Glassdoor.

The Glassdoor study found that almost 75% of remote workers want to return to their office or physical place of work. It is not surprising that the majority of respondents sought to end homebound work, as the pandemic has caused what is known as stir-craziness in the US.

However, this sentiment clearly has not changed the rather negative attitude towards mandatory vaccines. It largely points to the fact that employees don’t want to feel as though they're under the heel of their employers, at least not to the extent of their medical involvements.

Despite the unwillingness to get vaccinated under an employer mandate, roughly half of the responders were in favor of one. For instance, the 7.01% that responded with “other” elaborated that it all depends on a number of factors, such as the nature and field of work, whether the employees have underlying issues and other considerations. These respondents, along with the 42.94% that agreed with the employer-required vaccine, show that a large chunk of the population still supports employee vaccination, even if it comes with a mandate.

Almost a quarter of respondents feel extremely uncomfortable about getting a government-mandated vaccination

Following the uneasiness of an employer-mandated vaccination, a hefty 24.92% of respondents reported feeling extremely uncomfortable with a government-mandated vaccine. This kind of attitude is much in line with the growing mistrust of vaccines in the US. This particular statistic shows that having the government decree the vaccination of its citizens only exacerbates this mistrust.

Alternatively, when you consider all the answers on the comfortable side against all of those on the uncomfortable side, a different narrative arises. That is because the sum of all the comfortable answers is 46.43%, while all the uncomfortable answers add up to 45.64%. This elucidates that although the respondents are largely divided on this issue, roughly more than half still feel some relative ease towards getting a vaccine demanded by the government.

Can the Coronavirus Vaccine Fix the US Economy?

There are two ways we approached this topic. First, we asked respondents whether a Covid-19 vaccine would empower them to make more purchases. A significant 36.6% of responders said a vaccine won’t change their purchasing habits. However, retailers can rejoice in that 16.2% answered with “absolutely,” signaling a promising bump to the economy.

 

Next, we asked responders a more encompassing question about the economy — whether a coronavirus vaccine will repair it. The responses to this prompt were much more positive, with almost 22% reporting “moderately likely” and almost 18% answering with “extremely likely.” The sum of all the likely votes is at a whopping 59.5%, whereas those of all the unlikely votes is 22.5%.

Clearly, Americans are hopeful in the state of the economy when a successful vaccine comes along. Some have even openly expressed that they will buy more because of it. These are the markers of the more positive associations of a coronavirus vaccine.

Life Won’t Go Back to Normality… at Least Not Fully

The final question we posed to our respondents was one of a general outlook of the future, that is, if life will resume its normality after a Covid-19 vaccine becomes available. Over a quarter (25.5%) of responders believe that while life will begin returning to a kind of “normal”, certain things have been changed forever.

There is some truth to this already in existence. Working from home has been the dominant work model for non-essential workers, especially those of the white-collar kind. Given its pervasiveness for some six months, several large companies have already aired their plans to allow employees to work from home even after the pandemic ends, i.e. permanently. For example, these include brands such as Facebook, Twitter, Shopify and Slack.

Additionally, e-commerce has consistently been on the rise. Because of Covid-19, the shift towards e-commerce has been accelerated by 5 years. That is going to take time to undo, if it will be undone at all, with many consumers spending a great deal of time online. What is certain, is that the world has abruptly changed and will continue to in many respects, even as life “returns to normal.” Brands and researchers alike should thus stay in the know of how their target market is thinking. Carrying out surveys will help you do just that.

by Pollfish Marketing Team

The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

The Most Insightful Market Research Questions You Can Ask

With great customer expectations in today’s ever-growing digital world, market research has become exceedingly important. It should be at the forefront of every business’s strategy. Even if you feel as though you’ve nailed your target market down to a tee, there will always remain work to be done on the market research front.

That’s because market trends sway, as do the opinions and desires of your customer base. That means when you least expect it, even your most loyal customers will turn to your competitors, sometimes for good. But you can still stay in the know about what your customers want and think by running a sturdy market research plan.

As part of any solid market research endeavor, you’ll need an apt set of questions to help answer the most pressing needs and opinions of your customers. You’ll also need sets of questions that pertain to your needs as well; this is especially crucial to understanding your customers’ minds about your product or service.

Let’s explore four sets of insightful market research questions.

Questions Based on Pain Points

These questions are thematically based on the difficulties customers may have undergone, are currently experiencing, or may run into in the future. In regards to the latter, these types of questions are great in that they are wired to prevent the pain points from occurring in the first place.

Here are some examples of market research questions on customer experience (CX) and customer journey points of friction.

  1. What is the most difficult aspect of [action related to your product]?

    a. For example, if you supply sneakers, the action can be a certain physical activity people perform in sneakers. If you sell software, it can be in regards to an issue your software helps address.

  2. What bothers you the most about [product, service, or aspect related to either of the two]?

  3. What issues do you typically run into on our website?

  4. How can we better support your needs when shopping for…?

  5. What frustrates you the most about [product, service, or action related to either one]?

Questions Based on Goals

Goals-based questions help answer what your customers want, in that they inquire specifically about what it is customers are looking for and what they hope to gain from a product or service. These questions do not necessarily have to zero in a particular product/service — although some of them should. Rather, they can focus on improving specific tasks/actions related to your field. This will not only help you understand how your customers feel about your market but will allow you to innovate more and faster.

Here you’ll find some examples of market research questions on customer goals.

  1. What do you look for in a [product, service, or action related to the particular market]?

  2. What do you think [product, service, action related to either one] can do to improve its usefulness?

  3. What can [product, service, action related to either one] do to help improve your overall user experience?

  4. What aspects would you like to see in new [products or services]?

  5. What do you hope to gain when taking on [problem or goal within a market]?

Questions Based on Pricing

Pricing has always been (and will remain to be) a major part of the buying equation. Even customers in the luxury sector care about prices to some extent. No one wants to be ripped off; even businesses aim to save money. For example, in 2020, 69% of companies are expected to decrease ad spending.

Thus, it is ideal to have reasonably priced goods or services. But you won’t know what is considered a reasonable price until you conduct a questionnaire on your target market. Referring to general internet research alone will not suffice for this.

Here are a few examples of market research questions to ask about pricing.

  1. What is a reasonable price range for [product or service]?

  2. Are there any conditions in which you’d be willing to buy [product or service] at a higher range?

  3. What do you think is the ideal price for [product or service]?

  4. How would you rate the prices within [industry, niche, or specific market]?

    a. These can be answered within a gradient of too high/too low answers

  5. Is [price point] too high, low, or a fair ask for [product, service, or completion of an action]?

Questions Based On Psychographic Traits

Psychographic questions help reveal the psychological characteristics within your target market, or your entire pool of respondents. This type of approach to market research questions involves the feelings, interests, and attitudes your customer base holds.

It allows brands to understand their customers at a more intimate level, specifically, their views on any topic. You can tailor these to focus on your product/service or the desired act of making purchases.

Here are a few examples of questions based on psychographic traits.

  1. Which of the following is most important to you?

  2. How do you like to spend your free time?

  3. If you had more time, which of the following would you do?

  4. If you had more time, what would you spend more money on?

  5. How do you favor making purchases?

  6. What interests you?

  7. What draws you to one brand over another in the [niche, industry, space, etc.]?

A Reminder on Market Research Questions

All four of the question types covered in this article are critical to tap into the brains of your current and potential customers. What’s more empowering about these kinds of questions is that they can help you expand your target market and appeal to a much wider audience. They can inform both your marketing strategies, your content, and the innovation of your product/service itself.

But you must remember, these in-depth questions do NOT cover demographics. Instead, these questions are for those who already passed the screening question portion of the survey.

Screening questions, which determine the eligibility of a respondent to partake in a survey, answer demographic questions about the responders. While they are incredibly necessary to understand who your respondents are, they do not necessarily allow you to conclude your customers’ behaviors, needs, and attitudes (although a few of them might).

A strong survey should combine both sets of questions for a comprehensive market research assemblage.

If you’re looking for more great resources on using surveys to meet your business and marketing goals, check out the Pollfish Resource Center, or reach out to our 24/7 customer experience team for guidance and support.

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by Pollfish Marketing Team