How to Conduct Restaurant Market Research Like A Pro
How to Conduct Restaurant Market Research Like A Pro
Restaurateurs, cafe owners, and eatery purveyors must conduct restaurant market research, as it is a highly competitive restaurant industry. Given that the industry is dominated by changing customer habits, businesses need to conduct thorough research to uncover potential opportunities.
As new restaurants open every day, the competition also increases. To stand out from this competition and ensure that prospective buyers know about their brand, restaurants must find strategies that enhance customer experience and content marketing strategy and advertising.
That usually involves an in-depth analysis of their customer preferences and an understanding of their competitors, neither of which is possible without restaurant market research. This article explains how restaurant owners can research their target market to ensure continued success, along with what market research means for the restaurants and the benefits of adopting these strategies.
The Growing Demand For Restaurants
Covid-19 had a devastating impact on the restaurant industry, as it hit the global hospitality businesses with brute force, compelling a complete ban on indoor dining leading to reduced sales.
But with lifted restrictions in the U.S., the restaurant industry is slowly getting on track. There’s an increase in demand for in-person dining, which means that the restaurant industry is on the road to recovery, making this the perfect time to open a restaurant. But before that, restaurant owners need to conduct in-depth market research.
Reasons To Conduct Restaurant Market Research
Restaurant market research is essential for restaurant businesses and entrepreneurs to understand the latest market trends, identify consumer pain points and target exactly what the consumers are looking for. It is one of the simplest and most effective ways of maintaining a competitive edge.
The following are some reasons why businesses need to conduct restaurant market research:
1. Identifying the Target Market
Conducting restaurant market research enables restaurants to determine the key demographics of their potential new customers. There are three different types of customers that most new businesses will encounter. Adequate market research will offer valuable insights into targeting each of these customers to adapt to their needs and turn them into loyal customers.
The 'Savvy' Purchasers
These are customers that are most interested in an A-class customer experience. They do not necessarily care about the quality of the product but rather how the business treats its customers. Restaurants need to identify these customers through secondary market research and price their products competitively.
The Industry Influencer
Industry influencers are primarily concerned with the quality of the product. They do not care whether the product is too expensive, as long as it provides valuable service and offers them satisfaction. Restaurant businesses need to know who the industry influencers are because they can bring in other prospective customers and inspire people to buy from their company.
The End-User
End-user customers are those that will become the restaurant’s regular, loyal customers. It's necessary to identify these customers as they can provide valuable information on the frustrations or limitations of the business. As such, end-users make ideal primary research candidates since they can help restaurant businesses gain a competitive edge.
2. Analyzing the Effect Of Competition
Restaurant market research also helps restaurant owners to see how other restaurants in the area are operating to develop unique strategies to get an edge over them. The restaurant industry is competitive, so opening a new restaurant will only be successful if it has a unique approach that helps it stand out from the crowd. For example, restaurant owners need to research what restaurants serve food similar to them and what strategies they employ to attract their customers.
Choosing an appropriate location for the restaurant is also essential. For example, if it’s a family dine-in restaurant, restaurant owners need to choose a residential complex with a higher percentage of families with children. They need to avoid opening the restaurant in a location where there is already an established restaurant chain.
Market research will also help business owners identify and analyze the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors. They need to look for loopholes in their services and strive to avoid them in their restaurant.
3. Uncovering Revenue Opportunities
A restaurant market analysis offers insights into untapped opportunities that businesses can leverage to maximize their revenue. A comprehensive market analysis can help them understand industry needs better and can narrow the kind of opportunities they are looking for.
For example, it can help the restaurants understand how to grow their business during seasonal events like Easter or Christmas. Companies can maximize their reach during specific seasons by offering promotional offers and unique menu items popular among customers.
4. Solving Business Challenges
One of the main problems affecting new restaurant owners is coming up with immediate solutions to problems. Many issues that arise require significant changes in restaurant strategies that can disrupt their operations.
To ensure successful restaurant operations, they need to ask themselves what their restaurant is doing differently from its competitors. They need to analyze their competitor’s business loopholes to identify any potential problems they might face later in the business.
Being aware of such issues and taking necessary precautions can help business owners devise the strategies required to overcome them.
5. Setting Targets For Their Restaurant Business
With actionable data and insights on their target customer base, restaurant businesses can set goals for the growth and improvement of their business.
Whether they want to establish a particular niche for their restaurant or introduce a special menu, market data enables them to set achievable targets.
How To Conduct Restaurant Market Research
The following are two popular methods of conducting this kind of research:
Using Primary Market Research Methods For Restaurants
- Competitive assessments enable restaurant businesses to see how their competitors perform and identify gaps that their restaurants can fill in the market.
- Focus groups allow restaurant owners to connect with their target audience by inviting them to test menu items. They can also leverage industry influencers and food bloggers to get first-hand feedback.
- Online Surveys to gain valuable feedback on the restaurant from the business’s target audience. Websites such as Google Surveys and Survey Monkey allow restaurant owners to do surveys for collecting consumers' purchasing and dining practices.
Using Secondary Resources for Restaurant Market Research
Secondary market research for the restaurant industry offers restaurant owners a complete overview of the market's external environment. Not only this, it enables them to observe their position in the market and what their target customers are thinking about their restaurant business.
The following are some types of secondary restaurant market research resources restaurant businesses need to see.
- Industry Reports: Culinary trends change seasonally as consumer habits change. So reading up on industry trends and reports like the National Restaurant Association can provide restaurant businesses with valuable insights about consumer preferences.
- Case Studies: On a more formal level, case studies can provide businesses with in-depth knowledge about a specific restaurant niche, its key characteristics, and the implications of specific strategies on consumer behavior. It is perfect if the restaurants explore new marketing methods and want some real-life industry examples.
- Statistics Sites: These sites include vital information on the popularity of a product in a specific location, pricing levels, and the demand for a product. It offers statistical information on purchasing patterns and consumer preferences to help restaurant businesses conduct behavioral analysis regarding their restaurant.
- Research Papers: Research papers can help give insights into the effectiveness of different marketing strategies and offer insightful ways of maximizing revenue and customer satisfaction. Research papers are particular, and there is a research paper available on the internet for every topic. These papers can help businesses deepen their knowledge and understand it in a better way.
Secondary Restaurant Market Resources
The following is the list of the best resources on all the important data and insights on the restaurant industry.
The official website of the National Restaurant Association offers the latest industry trends, relevant statistics, and growth tactics. Existing and new restaurants can put this data to good use.
Explore industry reports and analyses on different subjects ranging from the growth in the food industry to the rising popularity of restaurant management software in the restaurant business.
This website lets restaurant owners explore key findings in purchasing patterns, dining behaviors, and changing consumer food preferences. Given the impact of the pandemic on the restaurant industry in 2020, MarketResearch shows how the previous year impacted consumer patterns and how restaurants can adapt to changing patterns to maximize their revenue.
This website has a culmination of useful reports of all kinds of food establishments, including hotels, cafes, small food stalls, etc. The best part about this website is that it provides information on service industries all over the globe. So regardless of the location, the restaurants are in, they can find a relevant industry report, press release, or publication.
This is a massive database of full-service restaurants in the US, compiled and managed by IBISWorld, a trusted platform for industry research on multiple industries worldwide.
Opening New Areas of Opportunities for Restaurants
The restaurant industry mainly depends on guesswork and assumptions. But with in-depth market research, the restaurant businesses can open new areas of opportunity to get ahead of their competitors and attract more customers. But for that, they need high-quality data extracted from real consumers.
This is where Pollfish comes in. It is a market research platform that offers data directly from the business’s target audience through mobile-optimized surveys. This platform offers several different ways to tap into the restaurant’s target audience base and research according to their business requirements.
How Pollfish Provided Global Support for an App Client
How Pollfish Provided Global Support for an App Client
Market research is crucial for brands that have a global footprint, as well as those seeking to venture into the international stage. Pollfish empowers businesses with global support for all of their global market research needs.
This kind of research is a must for tapping into the minds of a global target market, along with building customer loyalty across the world. 95% of global customers consider customer service as essential in their business choice and loyalty.
It is virtually impossible to create a strong customer service and experience for global customers without understanding their habits, opinions and needs. Thus, conducting market research is essential.
While there are plenty of syndicated research firms and market research platforms available, they do not all deliver robust global support for international market research.
This article lays out how Pollfish is the ideal platform for conducting market research across nations, along with a use case from an app client that shows the prowess of Pollfish global support.
Global Support Capabilities for Market Research
A potent market research campaign should involve using a tool that makes it easy to access global markets and one that can operate at speed. Ideally, it should take the same amount of time to run a global market research campaign, as it would a domestic one.
Survey research is a practical form of conducting global market research, but not every survey platform is built the same. As such, not all platforms provide the same kind of quality for conducting surveys locally, let alone abroad.
Pollfish provides a unique edge to businesses who seek to branch out into the global arena, as well as to companies that have an established global presence. There are several ways that the Pollfish online survey platform provides market researchers with top-notch global support, the kind that enables them to quickly gain customer insights from a multitude of countries.
First off, Pollfish offers customer support on a 24-hour basis, so researchers in practically all parts of the globe can get support at any time of the day. Thus, they’ll never have to change their busy schedules to accommodate their market research tool. Instead, the platform is accommodated to their liking and needs. Any misgiving, doubt or difficulty they may experience is no problem for our team of market research experts working round the clock to ensure an effective global survey study.
Next, the Pollfish platform does not charge businesses extra for running surveys outside of their home countries. As such, market researchers can freely conduct global market research, reaching any country they wish, without incurring additional charges. They have access to a wide net of global customers, all under one platform and without being monetarily constrained.
Finally, the Pollfish market research platform itself is equipped with various features that allow researchers to carry out their global research needs smoothly and quickly. This is largely because the platform is powered by some of the most advanced forms of technology, some of which eliminate the need to use other primary research tools and conduct secondary research.
The Prowess of the Pollfish Online Survey Platform for Global Research
In reference to the previous section, aside from the 24-hour support and no additional charges for global surveys, the Pollfish online survey platform offers many high-quality features for conducting global market research.
The following lists all the capabilities that Pollfish offers to ensure a strong and seamless global survey research campaign:
- Survey deployment to 160 countries
- Translations feature
- Multiple audiences feature
- Allows researchers to filter audiences by country, in order to see results on a per-country basis for comparisons.
- Survey deployment and iteration is executed at speed
- Researchers can survey up to 10,000 respondents per survey
- Reaching customers internationally does not require a longer survey completion time.
- It takes the same amount of time to deploy, illiterate and retrieve global responses.
- Targeting virtually all demographic groups
Use Case with Pollfish App Client
A Pollfish client used the Pollfish survey platform for a global expansion campaign. Lingokids, a learning app for young children, sought to expand the presence of its app in order to achieve international brand awareness.
Lingokids faced several challenges in its pursuit. First off, it still needed to crack the challenge of developing local brand awareness, making that of the global variety a much more difficult feat.
The app client also set out to generate stories for press releases that speak to its target market.
With traditional market research models, the client would have endured limitations and high costs. But with Pollfish, Lingokids received access to a reasonably-priced self-service platform market research that operates on RDE (random device engagement sampling).
RDE is a kind of sampling that engages users in their natural digital habitats, without pre-recruiting them. Rather, their participation is completely voluntary and anonymous. Thus, the respondents are not pressured to answer questions in any particular way, which stamps out certain survey biases and fraud.
The platform uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to perform ongoing quality checks as the surveys are running. This way, all of the resulting customer data that researchers receive is of the highest quality. These checks filter respondents through various kinds of quality criteria and disqualify participants who do not meet these standards.
For example, surveys with gibberish answers and flatlining answers (same multiple-choice answers consecutively) are disqualified, along with respondents that mask their geographical location or use a VPN. This method discards poor data, removing biases, errors and useless information — without the researchers having to lift a finger.
Based in Spain, Lingokids started launching Pollfish surveys in 2019 Sain to generate data and stories for press releases. But Lingokids’ success is not limited to Spain. The app client surveyed customers in other geos, such as the US, Mexico, and other countries.
“I’ve seen amazing results. If I put together all the press releases based on Pollfish data, not only in Spain, but in the US, Mexico, and other countries, I would say we’ve gotten over a hundred stories in tier 1, 2, and 3 media. That’s pretty good for a start-up,” said Sara Mateos-Aparicio, Communications Manager at Lingokids.
As a Spanish company, understanding the US market has posed several challenges. But
survey data from Pollfish paid off, as Lingokids used their survey data for different media campaigns in California and New York. The survey data helped them measure impacts pre-and post-campaign.
Those surveys were completed in about three to four days, with Lingokids also having received 800 survey responses in 24 hours.
Lingokids was able to not only measure and grow its brand awareness, but understand how to grow globally by analyzing the media types that work best to reach its target market in different countries.
Survey data also helped Lingokids learn about its competition along with gathering subtle insights into the culture of the US market. For example, Lingokids learned that children’s safety with learning apps concerned US parents more than parents in many other countries. This granted Lingokids the insights it needed to better launch US campaigns, having centered them on safety.
In summary, by running international surveys on the Pollfish online survey platform, Lingokids obtained over 100 stories in tier 1, 2, and 3 media, measured brand awareness in pre-and post-media campaigns, netted 800 survey responses in 24 hours, unearthed data on the competition in other countries and gained actionable insights into other cultures.
“You can make assumptions about your market, but they’re just assumptions,” said Sara Mateos-Aparicio, Communications Manager at Lingokids. “With Pollfish, you can confirm those
assumptions and they become data.”
Global Support with a Strong Online Survey Tool
While plenty of online market research platforms offer a best-in-class solution, not all such platforms offer global support and capabilities as does the Pollfish platform. Businesses who are serious about studying their target market in other countries must use a robust online survey platform.
Businesses should therefore invest in a platform that allows them to study their global customers at scale and at speed, without worrying about incurring higher costs or running into technical issues.
A self-service survey platform, Pollfish gives businesses quick access to various global markets and offers 24-hour support, should researchers encounter any difficulties or concerns. It helps hundreds of clients run global market research on a daily basis.
If you would like to learn more about how Lingokids leveraged the Pollfish platform, read our use case.
How to Build a Strong Survey Campaign for Market Research
How to Build a Strong Survey Campaign for Market Research
A strong survey campaign is invaluable for market research. This is because survey studies provide the most potent means of gathering your own unique research — primary research, that is.
A survey campaign is part of a far larger endeavor, as it is just one methodology in a research campaign. Thus, it requires more than merely being planned out; researchers must decide on one of the types of research to conduct before settling on a survey.
There’s also more when it comes to producing a strong survey campaign. This article explains this in full detail, so that businesses and market researchers can create surveys that reap the most insights.
Defining a Survey Campaign
A survey campaign is a series of efforts used to gain firsthand data from a target market in market research, or a target population in general research.
This kind of campaign is a primary research method in which researchers attempt to find a solution to a problem. For example, it can focus on the problem they would come upon in descriptive research.
But there’s much more to survey campaigns. Although they can be used to resolve problems discovered in a type of research, such as exploratory, causal, etc., they can be used for a wealth of other purposes.
When it comes to business, a survey campaign can determine if a new strategy will be beneficial, detrimental or affect little to no changes. What even more important is that such a campaign allows businesses to understand the lifeblood of their business: their customers.
What a Survey Campaign Helps Reveal for Your Business
Dovetailing off of the previous section, there are many things a survey campaign can help a business achieve. Some of these go beyond market research itself.
Here are some of the other purposes a survey campaign helps serve:
- Understanding the makeup of your target market
- Via the target market survey
- Market segmentation for further segmenting
- Testing a creative strategy for a number of macro applications such as
- Advertising
- Branding
- PR
- General marketing
- Obtaining customer feedback and getting a deep read of your target market
- Via a customer satisfaction survey
- Includes the NPS, CSAT, CES, visual rating survey & more
- Discovering the CLV (customer lifetime value)
- Via a customer satisfaction survey
- Excelling in product endeavors
- Testing product satisfaction
- Innovating products with new features and upgrades
- Understanding how your product compares with competitors’
- Avoiding negative publicity
- Regular checks on the opinions of your brand
- Finding customer aversions to avoid in your messaging and brand’s image
- Obtaining employee feedback
- Running a pulse survey
- Via the employee satisfaction survey
- Improving your CX
- Via a customer experience survey
- Using a survey for content marketing strategy
- Driving Lead generation
- Includes B2B endeavors
- Helps you learn more about the specific needs and desires of your target market, or B2B clients such as partners, vendors and other businesses.
- Acclimating with your niche
- Allows brands to keep up with market and niche trends
- Makes it easier to change with the times
- Completing a market analysis
- Being able to compare your brand with others
- Getting a feel of the thoughts and attitudes in your overall space
Proving the Value of a Survey Campaign
While many brands turn to market research, they do not always carry it out successfully. With primary research specifically, it is more difficult to reap accurate, bias-free insights, as it involves far more than just an analysis, but the labor of conducting the research yourself.
Additionally, a business may encounter the issue of biases, a lack of participants and even responses that are hard to draw conclusions from.
A survey campaign provides the antidote to all of these problems — when conducted correctly, that is.
A survey campaign is useful for reasons beyond the 10 in the aforementioned list. Here are a few ways this kind of campaign is a must for businesses:
Since surveys help measure the CX (customer experience), they inform businesses on a variety of touchpoints that influence their CX and how they do so. This is important, as 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a good CX. Thus, a business can improve its customer experience, which will therefore increase sales.
76% of customers expect businesses to understand their needs. A properly designed survey campaign will do exactly this. This is because you can create a number of different, although related surveys under one campaign. By creating diverse surveys, you can study a more diverse set of segments in your target market. This kind of research will help you understand and adapt to their needs.
When it comes to branding and customer loyalty, businesses can stand to run a survey campaign for a variety of reasons. First off, 86% of consumers believe that authenticity is important when they decide on the brands they choose to support.
Surveys can also help in brand recognition; simply deciding on a correct signature color can spur brand recognition as high as 80%. Creating a survey campaign with visually-oriented surveys can achieve this.
Then comes the sensitive issue of news and culture, particularly social and political issues. 64% of consumers from across the globe said that they would either boycott or buy from a company simply for its political or social stance. A survey campaign allows you to quiz your target market on its thoughts surrounding current affairs so that you take the correct position or none at all.
How to Build a Survey Campaign
The following explains how to set up a survey campaign, ensuring you use the correct surveys, frequency and other functions within your campaign.
- Find what it is you need to study; consider the things that matter to your business and have little to no research, such as what you would use in exploratory and explanatory studies.
- Or, if you have already conducted exploratory or explanatory research, consider other related factors or issues that you’d like to study.
- Once you find a topic of study, which can be any business phenomenon, for example, a decrease in sales of a particular product, tie it to a larger purpose or campaign.
- For example, perhaps it fits into branding more, or perhaps it is an advertising issue.
- When you’ve affixed your campaign with a macro-application (ex: advertising), decide whether you’ll need to run one or several surveys.
- Consider conducting causal research on the matter, as this will find cause and effect relationships and since survey launches are one of the last steps of the entire research process.
- If you perform this research and discover cause and effect relationships, you may need to rework your intentions or original questions.
- Come up with several questions. An ideal starting point is to sift through the 6 main types of survey questions and to deliberate which will be of most use.
- Using the question types as question templates, form your questions.
- When you’ve come up with 10-15 questions, consider cutting them and organizing them into two or more surveys. (Shorter surveys have greater response rates).
- As you organize your questions, create the appropriate theme for each survey.
- Create a callout that briefly explains what the survey is for.
- Customers are fond of transparency.
- Here you can mention that the survey is to improve their own CX, or that their opinion matters.
- Use a strong online survey tool to create, launch and run your survey to the correct target market.
- Perform a survey data analysis and jot down key findings.
- Use your findings to draw a conclusion about a hypothesis, or continue doing further research, such as correlational, causal or even experimental.
- Your original results will bring key findings that answer your work’s key questions, answer a hypothesis or prompt further research.
- This may require further survey research.
Consolidating Your Research
A research project often manifests as a long and winding process, rife with several sub-campaigns and tasks. A survey campaign can help tame this process, easing the way to finding key results.
This is because surveys provide agility and speed to insight — when conducted correctly. It is virtually impossible to find hundreds or even thousands of respondents that properly fit your target population, let alone convince them to take a survey.
That’s where an online survey tool offers a multitude of value, as it can carry out these tasks and more, with little to no effort from you. A strong online survey tool is thus a necessity for your survey campaign needs.
Diving Into the Pulse Survey to Meet Business Demands
Diving Into the Pulse Survey to Meet Business Demands
Running a pulse survey is key to properly running a business — and running a business is not always a smooth operation. There is a wide breadth of considerations to carefully examine, yet even with continual check-ups, they are still susceptible to going awry.
When you measure the pulse of your business, the premise that the pulse survey hinges on, you are able to keep track of your business and how others engage with it — be they your customers, your partners and your employees.
This article delineates the pulse survey in-depth, so that you can build effective survey studies for your market research needs and be in tune with the pulse of your business.
Defining the Pulse Survey
The pulse survey gauges the pulse of your business, as its moniker indicates. “Pulse” refers to the “motions” the key individuals to your company go through in regards to your business. As such, this survey type must be administered frequently.
Like a biological pulse, the rhythmical throbbing of that which keeps you alive, i.e., blood — a business’s pulse involves understanding the lifeblood of its business. This includes customers’ opinions, employee engagement and sentiment and the thoughts of your vendors and partners. The latter is especially true for a B2B business.
As such, when those in the business world discuss “keeping a pulse” on their company, they are alluding to collecting the feedback surrounding this pulse.
Pulse surveys often refer to employee pulse surveys, which are a kind of employee feedback survey, however, they can collect the pulse from a variety of respondents and serve various purposes. These include:
- Evaluating customer satisfaction
- Measuring employee satisfaction
- Finding the opinions, needs and sentiments of partners, business clients and vendors via B2B surveys
- Understanding your content consumers via content marketing strategy
- Getting insights into the operations of your business
The Key Characteristics of a Pulse Survey
What specifically makes up a pulse survey?
Pulse surveys contain more specifics than merely the key trait of gathering feedback to understand the inner workings of your company. Instead, they include key aspects you need to adhere to when deliberating how you’ll use this survey type and how to create one.
- Marked by frequent check-ins on the same audience.
- This can be weekly, monthly, bi-annually, quarterly or set in a custom frequency.
- They measure the impacts of small and large occurrences.
- The surveys tend to be 3-6 questions in length.
- The surveys are concentrated on either a campaign, topic, experience, etc.
- They’re used to track trends and hyper-segment your respondents (employees, customers, etc.) similar to market segmentation.
- These surveys are used to study changes among opinions, behaviors, attitudes and more within a particular group.
- They can be used to compare shifts in opinions among certain segments with consistency in that of others.
The Importance of Using a Pulse Survey
Incorporating a pulse survey is key to ensuring various successes for your business. There are a number of ways in which the pulse survey benefits your business.
First off, it doesn’t merely tell, but it proves to your respondents that you value their insights. While not many people enjoy taking surveys, a short survey that explains in the intro or call-out that it is being conducted to improve the service/experience for customers lets them know that you pay attention to their needs.
This is beneficial when it comes to vendors and partners, as it gives them the reassurance that they are not merely contractually bound with your business, but that their input matters and that they have a say in the business relationship.
The same notion applies to employees, the group chiefly used in pulse surveys. Workplace stress is common; in fact 40% of workers reported that their work was extremely stressful. Thus, a pulse survey is necessary to curb workplace stress. It is also crucial to keep employees engaged and satisfied with their work.
After all, a happy workplace won’t incite them to leave the job, whereas a toxic one inevitably will.
As such, relying on a pulse survey grants you the insights you need to keep issues at bay and cater to the needs of your business.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of a Pulse Survey
A pulse survey offers several advantages to a business. If the prior section on the importance of using a pulse survey wasn’t reason enough to start regularly implementing it, the following enumerates even more benefits that this survey provides. Like any business tool, however, there are some downsides to a pulse survey as well, as the following includes.
A pulse survey campaign can help raise revenue by improving customer/partner relationships.
The Advantages
- It is deployed periodically, giving you continuous key insights and updates on your target sampling pool.
- It identifies current (thus extremely relevant) insights on a wide array of issues and occurrences.
- The insights allow you to make much-needed upgrades, corrections and changes on a regular basis.
- Because it is employed periodically, you can identify trends and the ways in which your target sampling pool changes.
- It helps you understand the impact of events, whether they are large or minor.
- It shows you whether new employee policies, updated products or new vendor terms have had positive or negative effects.
- It is useful for assessing reactions to recent (or even ongoing) changes.
- It allows you to monitor virtually any activity or sentiment.
- These surveys tend to be short and thus are easy to create.
- Checking on the pulse allows you to zero in on current needs and objectives with a targeted set of questions.
The Disadvantages
- Requiring constant updates and feedback can be off-putting for customers, employees, vendors and all else.
- When no major event, change or attitude springs from the previous round of pulse surveys, it can be difficult to create new pulse survey targets without coming off as repetitive.
- These are not as anonymous or random as other business surveys, as such, some respondents will be reluctant to take them or refuse entirely.
- Less anonymity incurs less honest answers, giving way to survey bias.
How to Conduct a Pulse Survey
Creating a pulse survey requires taking several key measures to ensure you carry it out properly and gain the key data that captures your pulse. Here is how to create a pulse survey for your various needs.
- Start from scratch by defining the purpose of your pulse survey campaign.
- First, lay out the high-level considerations, such as who the targets of the survey are and which area of business you would like to survey.
- Then, find something specific and current that you need to check up on.
- Decide on the most apt length of your survey.
- This should be an approximation since you haven’t created your questions yet.
- Create a welcoming call-out and/or intro to your survey so that the respondents will be more inclined to take it.
- Include call-outs such as: “Your feedback means so much to us” and “Help us help serve you.”
- For employee pulse: “Let’s make work a better place,” and “Complete this survey so we can improve your work and responsibilities.”
- Create your questionnaire, consisting of 3-6 questions and no more than 10 for longer surveys.
- Make sure the questions are relevant to the topic/issue you are checking in about.
- Consider your answers; some may prompt follow-up questions while others won’t be relevant to all respondents based on their answers. Thus, apply advanced skip logic.
- Determine a suitable survey cadence.
- Taking the following into consideration: how often the aspects you’re surveying are subject to change.
- How soon you’re going to make changes and if those changes warrant immediate pulse surveys.
- Put together a list of positive and negative responses in your survey analysis.
- Ideate how to address the negative attitudes, i.e., how to allay them and what to change in your business.
- Use advanced people analytics to your pulse data for market segmentation purposes, as well as a deeper read of the pulse.
- Share the results.
- Review the results with the appropriate team. Ex: partnerships, marketing, HR, the product team, etc.
- If you run an employee pulse survey, share the findings with the entire team for the sake of transparency.
- Take action.
- After reviewing the results, take any necessary action to improve employee, customer and partner relations and satisfaction.
- Make necessary changes to the campaign itself, such as to the cadence, etc.
Pulse Survey Question Tips and Examples
Create questions that are broad (at least the early ones) so that they are pertinent to all the targeted respondents. The idea is to avoid survey bias along with question skipping.
Make sure to include at least one open-ended and one closed-ended question. This is especially useful if a multiple-choice question warrants an explanation, one that cannot always be answered via a follow-up multiple-choice question, but rather one with an open field.
This gives their original responses much more depth and a qualitative component to the survey.
Make sure your questions are specific and use skip logic if need be. Your questions should yield measurable data that creates actionable insights.
Here are a few pulse question examples:
Pulse Survey Question Examples
- Do you feel that the company has done a good job of informing employees about [initiative]? [Yes or no]
- If no, use skip logic to route them to an open-question for an explanation.
- Target audience: Employees
- On a scale of 1-7, how strongly do you agree with the following?: We have effectively managed the recent change in our organization.
- Uses a Likert scale
- Target audience: Employees
- What do you think of our new product feature?
- Use nominal answers (varied and not scaled)
- Target audience: Customers
- How can we better make your holiday shopping experience?
- Use nominal answers (varied and not scaled)
- Target audience: Customers
- How comfortable are you in supplying us [various goods, needs, etc]?
- Use a Likert scale and skip logic to an open-question for an explanation of a low rating.
- Target audience: Vendors and partners
- What are some of the changes you would like to see to ensure a mutually beneficial partnership?
- Use an open-ended question.
- Target audience: Vendors and partners
Continually Improving Your Business
Regardless if you are a B2C or B2B company, in order to sustain a successful business, you need to monitor the pulse of various issues in your business. Whether it is ensuring a lengthy partnership — one with renewal, achieving a higher CLV (customer lifetime value) among customers or maintaining employee satisfaction, you need to implement a pulse survey campaign.
Such a campaign will enable you to keep a constant check-in on the aspects of your business that matter the most, along with those in need of alterations the most. Either way, deploying a periodic pulse survey to various targets will help you understand the key players of your business.
This will allow you to serve them better and forge business relationships with longevity.
A successful pulse survey relies on a robust online survey platform. This tool should be able to facilitate a vast amount of survey types and styles and deploy them to the correct audience with ease and little to no effort from the researcher.
If you have such a tool in hand, you are setting up your business for various successes.
Conducting Global Market Research with a Dynamic Market Research Platform
Conducting Global Market Research with a Dynamic Market Research Platform
Businesses that seek to offer products and services to international customers would be remiss not to conduct global market research. This form of research prepares both current businesses participating in a global market, along with prospective ones.
Understanding customers from across the world is equally highly regarded internationally, as it is in the US. 66% of global customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. As such, providing the correct experiences and fulfilling the needs of customers is no longer a secondary requirement for global consumers.
Performing market research should therefore not be limited to domestic studies, whether it is for an international e-commerce business or a content provider who seeks global research.
This article expounds on global market research, its importance, key components, challenges and how to conduct it, along with a use case from a real Pollfish client.
Understanding Global Market Research
Global market research stems from the same idea as traditional market research — the process of gathering information about target markets and customers in a specific industry.
Global market research refers to the organized effort of systematically collecting, recording, designing, analyzing and interpreting information pertinent to a target market on a global scale. As such, this kind of market research studies individuals outside of local and national markets, examining those in the international space instead.
There are various market research techniques that market researchers can apply to their global market research campaigns. Existing and emerging technologies facilitate these efforts, breaking down what would have been obstacles.
Global market research is not the complete equivalent of traditional or domestic market research. While these two forms of research are parallel in certain regards, they differ in their approach and focus on different core subject matters.
Market research on a global scale is applicable to all business concepts, from the viability of new products to studying and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV). Therefore, conducting market research across the globe can help businesses improve in various ways and meet a wide variety of KPIs and objectives.
The Importance of Global Market Research
This kind of research is invaluable on various fronts — for businesses and general research purposes alike.
Firstly, the constant advancement of technology has opened many international business opportunities for companies to expand their business by venturing abroad. This is especially the case for SaaS companies and businesses that provide services that don’t require shipping materials to foreign countries. Thus, it is far more efficient to offer global services.
This means that businesses have target markets that far exceed those within their home country. To compete with any business in any industry, businesses must satisfy their customers and these concepts lay the foundation of the importance of global market research, because, to please customers, businesses must understand them at granular levels.
Market research provides a means of doing so, with various sources and methods to extract data on global customers.
Secondly, marketing strategies do not pan out in the same way across localities and different segments of a target market. As such, they will certainly not be received in the same way across different countries and continents.
Due to different cultural norms, languages and connotations, a company’s messaging, communications and marketing campaigns will therefore not have the same effect as they intend in different geographical markets. Global market research helps reconcile these differences across countries, by specifically focusing on cultural and geographical differences.
Additionally, information that contains the exact responses from a business’s global customers arms it with the knowledge and insights necessary for various business operations. It provides valuable information on executing changes or launches to product development, design, delivery, packaging and quality.
It also allows marketers to establish unique advertising campaigns, ones that are either made solely for a particular international market, or those that tweak existing campaigns to fit the cultural norms and sensitivities of other countries.
Moreover, conducting this research helps businesses properly set their prices when selling to customers abroad. This way, their pricing is reasonable across countries. For example, a piece of furniture may retail for a completely different price in the US than it would in France.
Furthermore, the global digital population is on the rise, with 4.66 billion active worldwide internet users. This figure represents 59.5% of the global population. A vast majority of these users, 92%, access the internet via mobile devices.
It would be negligent for businesses not to study this colossal population to improve all of their marketing and general business goals. They would simply need to use the correct online market research platform to examine this inflating population.
The Components of Global Market Research
Global market research has its own set of key components, some of which largely distinguish it from traditional and domestic market research. These components allow researchers to focus their survey research exclusively on the behaviors, sentiments, opinions and needs of customers abroad.
By paying attention to these components, businesses can gain insights that improve any globally-targeted marketing campaign and even forge brand loyalty.
The following lists several major components of global market research:
- The focus on a specific geography: Market research allows businesses to zero in on a specific country or continent.
- Reaching customers that appear to be unreachable: This involves using market research techniques to reach international customers directly, that is, through primary research tools, such as a focus group or an online survey platform.
- Not all market research methods and tools offer the same global reach.
- An analysis of cultural differences: This covers examining all possible cultural differences, from the role of women versus men in shopping, to religious holidays, to business closings, etc.
- Essentially, this allows brands to adjust their marketing and create messaging that can better relate to customers in different countries.
- An analysis of economic differences: This is critical to understand when setting up a global pricing strategy. This is because all countries have different economic climates; some may be undergoing a recession, some may incur strong unemployment rates, while others may be experiencing an economic boom — at least in a particular market.
- Tapping Into global markets via their native language: Not all members of a global target market speak English, which means that to study them, researchers will need to reach them in their native language.
- Ethnic considerations and national customs: Similar to cultural differences, studying specific national and ethnic concerns is important, as it helps businesses avoid marketing campaigns that can offend global customers’ sensibilities.
- Understanding typical Incomes: The income considered low or middle-class in one country may not be so in another. Global market research helps brands understand how typical incomes are classified across global regions.
- Additionally, it reveals common salaries and other income information across the demographic groups of a country.
- Product demand: Some countries will have demand for things that barely get an afterthought in other countries. This can be for a specific product or a product feature enhancement.
- By conducting global market research, businesses can understand the exact needs of their global target market and innovate accordingly.
- This way, they can create more viable products for international sale and satisfy their customers abroad.
The Challenges of Global Market Research
Global market research is beset with its own share of challenges that make it difficult to conduct, let alone complete. However, there are survey tools that make conducting this form of research practical and easy. But first, businesses need to acclimate themselves with the challenges that may come their way should they conduct global market research.
While some techniques and methods used in domestic market research may also be applied to their global counterparts, customer preferences are not easy to determine. As such, it is difficult to compare global markets due to the greater diversity in cultural, social, and economic differences, all of which affect consumption.
Then there is the challenge of conducting the research in the first place. Global market research is a far more ambitious project, therefore, it tends to require more hours on conducting various techniques, such as scouting for secondary research. These will differ among companies and research campaigns.
As far as methodology goes, global research also requires more time spent on execution. Researchers would need to contend with extracting the data, designing the study either across one country abroad or multiple countries, coordinating between different countries and piecing together the resulting data.
These are just some of the points of friction that businesses must grapple with before conducting their global studies.
Market researchers must also be somewhat knowledgeable of the local customs and environments of their respective targeted countries to carry out the research successfully, especially when conducting primary research. This will help researchers avoid making their subjects feel uncomfortable, therefore cutting back on survey attrition. This will also help researchers structure their primary research.
Then, there is the monetary challenge: large survey research projects are costly endeavors, some of which may incur hundreds of thousands a year. This is especially challenging for businesses that have just broken into the international market.
How to Conduct Global Market Research
Conducting global market research requires many of the prerequisites of domestic market research. A business will have to compile secondary and primary resources to perform an exhaustive study.
There are various secondary sources that businesses can incorporate into their global research.
Government agencies provide free access to statistics on their residents, a kind of hard data that is valuable for preliminary studies. These statistics are useful for learning about a foreign country’s demographics, state of its economy, and commerce status.
The International Trade Administration churns out economic reports, forecasts and infographics on various countries and industries. Their website can complement domestic market research, as it contains statistics on US national trade.
Researchers can also attend international trade shows, workshops, and seminars in their industry — some offer this virtually. For example, The Tradeshow Network Marketing Group lists all the major international tradeshows and their respective industries.
Each industry also has dedicated online publications that publish articles on emerging trends and news on the industry, including customer preferences, technology, products and services and other related information.
Finally, businesses need to conduct their global market research; this can be done in several ways. They can turn to survey panels, mail-in surveys, phone calls with existing customers and field research.
Online surveys are the most potent tools for global market research.
This is because an online survey platform, such as Pollfish, offers the best distribution method and allows businesses to study any segments of global customers, as it reaches 160 countries.
Using random device engagement (RDE), Pollfish targets digital users in their natural environments. Thus, respondent participation is randomized and voluntary, removing the risk of survey bias, as respondents are not pre-recruited and completely anonymous. Pollfish has the power to deploy surveys to a vast network of global customers, as it distributes surveys across the most visited websites and apps, to a sampling pool of 250 million people.
Additionally, Pollfish allows survey creation for 46 languages and also offers a Translate Survey feature. This way, businesses can seamlessly reach non-English speaking customers across the world.
Researchers can meet all of their quotas with the Pollfish online survey platform, with the option of adding quotas in the screener, along with multiple audiences per survey. This way, they can target various segments of their global target market. The platform also offers a survey completion time, so that researchers have a reasonable estimate of the time it takes to draw all the preset survey responses.
Global Market Research Use Case with a Pollfish Client
Kalsec, a food manufacturer that produces space and herb extracts, colors and food protection for the food and beverage industry, has used the Pollfish platform to run a global market research campaign.
Thus, the company deployed surveys in various global markets: those in the North American, European and Asian regions, specifically in Canada, the UK, France, China and Thailand. Given that to understand the needs of global customers, businesses must conduct studies on various global regions on a country-to-country basis.
This is exactly what Kalsec did, arming the business with critical insights they would need to pay extra for, had they used another online survey provider.
Specifically, Kalsec studied consumer behavior and purchase decision-making to get a sense of its global customers' purchasing behavior about its brand. The surveys that Kalsec ran centered on the snacking behaviors of residents in the five aforementioned countries.
The company sought insight on what drives customers from making their snack purchases and their Pollfish-powered global market research allowed them to compare customer behavior across various countries and better tailor their shopping campaigns.
Essentially, Pollfish technology broke down geographic and communication barriers across these global markets, granting speedy insights that the company wouldn’t obtain from secondary research alone.
Making Continuous Improvements in the Global Arena
Businesses that seek to offer their services to global customers ought to make use of global market research. The same goes for businesses with an established global presence, given that understanding customers is at the core of maintaining business success.
To conduct global market research, businesses need to use a robust online survey platform, such as Pollfish. A strong online survey tool will enable businesses to set granular demographic requirements for global customers, ask a wide style of questions (multiple-selection, single selection, ratings, etc), add advanced skip logic, add media files and use multiple audiences per survey.
Pollfish is built for global market research, as it offers 24-hour support, so that regardless of which time zone a client is in, they can easily reach the customer support team should they require assistance. Pollfish users do not have to pay more to gain access to global customers and send global surveys, a major advantage over the many other platforms.
A DIY survey platform, Pollfish allows businesses to make global market research an attainable goal.
How to Conduct Descriptive Research to Advance Your Business
How to Conduct Descriptive Research to Advance Your Business
Descriptive research is one of the main types of survey research and makes up the majority of online surveys.
Many times, researchers need to conduct descriptive research before they attempt to problem solve, as this sort of research aims to set the scene of a problem. Moreover, it is used prior to an issue being fully realized by researchers, as it is used to probe into the background of a problem.
Because of this, descriptive research is often used as a preliminary research method. However, this is not always the case, as when researchers are fully aware of an issue, they can perform experimental research or correlational research, which can be conducted first.
But in most cases, to fully understand a situation, descriptive research is useful in that it paints a clear picture of the problem, so it is often conducted in the early stages of research, just after exploratory research.
This article offers a deep dive into descriptive research, how it’s conducted and how it can help advance your business.
Defining Descriptive Research
As its name suggests, this form of research seeks to describe the key factors of a problem, phenomenon, situation or the behaviors of a population.
Descriptive research expounds on a population, occurrence or situation that a researcher chooses to or requires to study. As such, it aims on discovering latent details about a particular situation to fully understand it.
A preliminary research method, descriptive research forms the what, how, when and where surrounding a subject of study rather than on the why.
Before conducting research that explains why a phenomenon exists, it is critical to understand that it exists in the first place. It is also important to understand its full context, including particulars you may not have known about before conducting descriptive research.
Descriptive research is conclusive in nature, as the data derived from this research can be used to create statistics and make educated inferences on a target population.
The Key Aspects of Descriptive Research
Now that we have established the core meaning of descriptive research, it is critical to understand its makeup. This form of research has various qualities researchers ought to look into, to better understand its characteristics.
The following enumerates the key features of this research:
- Provides basic details regarding a research problem.
- Performed after exploratory research: it delves deeper into a hypothesis or theoretical idea established in exploratory research, while still being an early part of the overall research process.
- Fills in missing data: this is especially true when exploratory research is first performed.
- Preplanned and structured: Designed for further research around a phenomenon.
- Quantitative in nature: this research gathers numerical data used for making statistical analyses and drawing conclusions in relation to the studied population.
- Incorporates qualitative research: it can also include elements of qualitative research, to describe the research problem thoroughly. This is because descriptive research is more explanatory than exploratory or experimental.
- Uses uncontrolled variables: variables in this research are not controlled, as the researcher’s job is simply to observe and report, but not to interfere with the variables.
- Creates statistical relevance: this method studies a population to draw statistical inferences about it.
- Gateway for deeper research: After the results of descriptive research are collected, they can be used to power further analysis and research methods.
- Cannot make predictions or find causal relationships: it covers the what, how, etc. aspects that can be later used for further research such as experimental, causal and prospective research.
Why Your Business Needs Descriptive Research
Businesses need descriptive research for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it provides additional information about a topic, with details that exploratory research alone cannot. Dovetailing to this is the fact that descriptive research is still a part of the early stages of a research campaign, as it does not explain the “why” around a problem.
Businesses benefit from this research as it is used to measure the opinions, attitudes of your current customers and potential ones, i.e., those in your target market. You can also gather information about their behaviors to help you segment them.
In addition, the information acquired through descriptive research can be used for advanced data analysis that allows business owners and marketers to draw conclusions, segment audiences, measure trends, and make well-informed decisions on how to move forward.
Several common descriptive research surveys include the following list. You’ll notice that these deal with differing topics and purposes, though still fall under descriptive research. As such, descriptive research helps businesses better understand their customers, their employees, their communities and much more.
Descriptive Research Survey Examples
- The NPS survey (Net Promoter Score)
- To understand how likely your customers will recommend your brand or particular product or service.
- The cross-sectional survey
- Studies a particular population at one particular point in time.
- Can help confirm or disprove a hypothesis of, for example, shopping behavior during an ad campaign.
- The community survey
- Ideal for brick and mortar businesses seeking to understand their community and community needs better.
- The employee feedback survey
- Sets the scene on employee sentiment and satisfaction with a business.
- Useful during mergers, acquisitions, growth spurts or simple quarterly reviews.
- The Product satisfaction survey
- Focuses on the product side of a business.
- Helps you business understand how your product is being received, including the presence of any glitches.
How Descriptive Research Differs from Correlational, Exploratory and Experimental Research
Descriptive research differs significantly from the other main types of research methods known as exploratory and correlational research.
Descriptive research is commonly confused with exploratory research. While these two research methods both involve the initial studies of a research process along with identifying a problem or situation, they differ significantly.
Exploratory research provides information about a problem the researcher faces. It is usually the very initial research method researchers turn to. Alternatively, descriptive research pursues describing something, such as its characteristics and functions.
An exploratory research campaign provides the underpinning of upcoming research (usually descriptive research) to discover if the subject of study can be explained by a theory. Unlike descriptive research, exploratory research is not conclusive, as it is not concerned with stats and quantifying data.
Descriptive research, on the other hand, is conclusive in nature, as it is primarily quantitative and focused on forming statistics. It is also rigid and structured, while exploratory research is flexible and unstructured.
Correlational research differs from descriptive research in that it is designed to uncover relationships among variables to see how one may affect another or others.
Additionally, the results of correlational research are used to make predictions of future events from present insights.
On the contrary, descriptive research seeks to create a snapshot of a studied subject and does not involve testing variables, whereas correlational research does and is primarily involved with exploring the relationships between variables.
Experimental research is, like its name implies, highly experimental, as opposed to purely observational, such as descriptive research. Essentially the complete opposite of descriptive research in several regards. Firstly, it is related to correlational research, as it studies relationships between variables, but it takes this concept a step further.
Secondly, it works by interfering with variables. Experimental research involves manipulating variables to come to a conclusion or finding. Unlike descriptive research, it is usually conducted in the final stages of a research project.
Piggybacking off of correlational research, it seeks to find the cause and effect of causal relationships, the kind that correlational research would discover.
Additionally, unlike descriptive research, which answers “what is,” experimental research answers “what if.”
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Descriptive Research
Descriptive research has various advantages for business owners and researchers alike. However, as with any research method, there are a few drawbacks to keep in mind as well.
The Advantages
- Grants a relatively complete illustration of what is occurring at a given time.
- Quantifies and analyses non-quantified issues and subjects.
- Observes a situation naturally, allowing for the observation of variables in their natural environments.
- The least time-consuming quantitative initiative.
- Can use both quantitative and qualitative research techniques.
- Can be used to create new hypotheses, delve into hypotheses and hypotheticals and create new research questions.
- Provides an extensive view of a topic, finding gaps and unknown details.
- Defines and measures data trends.
- Comparisons, ex: how various demographics react with the same and different variables.
- Offers unique data collection, i.e., it can exist in the forms of:
- examining life experiences
- reports
- case studies (including personal accounts of participants)
- surveys
The Disadvantages
- Cannot determine cause and effect relationships, or the causes behind any phenomena.
- Falls prey to survey bias, as respondents may answer questions with answers that are more desirable or in line with social norms.
- Bias can also occur from the researchers’ end when they frame the questions to fit a certain narrative.
- Leaves scarce room for diversity in answers since the question types of descriptive research are close-ended.
Excelling in Descriptive Research
With all the various research types available, it is key to find the most appropriate type for your needs. Descriptive research is invaluable to use in the early stages of your research around a topic, however, it is not the earliest kind to incorporate.
It usually follows exploratory research, which lays down the foundation of a research project, including hypotheses and curiosities that descriptive research can further probe. As there are many ways to conduct descriptive research, researchers need to find concrete means for conducting them.
Surveys are a relatively quick and accessible method for carrying out descriptive research. A strong online survey platform will facilitate the descriptive research process.
How Global Surveys Offer Optimal Research Across Geographies
How Global Surveys Offer Optimal Research Across Geographies
How Global Surveys Offer Optimal Research Across Geographies
In order to conduct research on an international scale, researchers must implement global surveys in their studies.
These surveys allow researchers to amass insights from virtually every geographical location in an efficient way — should the online survey platform that houses them allow it.
With global surveys, businesses and general researchers can understand the attitudes, opinions and habits of those living outside of their country.
It is particularly useful to implement global surveys when conducting a study for thought leadership, given that it arms brands with original data to use in their content marketing strategy. However, they can be used for a number of different purposes.
This article explores global surveys, their use and importance, and how a platform that offers global support and capabilities tailored for global studies will best suit any business. Additionally, this article provides a Pollfish use case for a major study using global surveys.
Understanding Global Surveys
Like their name suggests, global surveys are surveys designed for an international audience and deployed across different countries and continents.
These surveys are developed to gather information from different geographical markets and can be used to compare and contrast the intelligence garnered from surveys deployed domestically.
Global surveys allow businesses to understand their international customers, an increasingly important need, given that most businesses sell online and can therefore be found by those across geographical locations.
These surveys also allow businesses to understand pressing issues across the world and see how the opinions of those issues differ across countries. Thus, this kind of intelligence allows businesses to extract unique data which they can use in their marketing efforts.
Global surveys can be used for major research undertakings, such as the study on stress and smoking rates in low to middle income countries. This study was conducted across 41 countries with a survey sample of 217,561 people. Global surveys provided a strong global reach, along with launching cross-sectional studies and using the results to form prospective studies.
Global studies can also be used for smaller research projects, such as those that only focus on one country abroad or a handful. They can be used on one aspect of a marketing campaign, such as gathering sentiment around a new ad campaign.
The Value and Importance of Global Surveys
These kinds of surveys lend themselves to various research projects, as there are many directions a research endeavor may take.
For example, a business that wants to gain more online traffic from the southwestern region of the US may discover a new segment of their target market: site visitors from a nearby country, such as one from the Caribbean. If this traffic becomes significant, the business ought to conduct primary research into that segment.
In this way, businesses can also seek to branch out into further markets, such as those in Europe or Asia. In order to do so, they would need to extract insights on their global target market, i.e., the segment of the population most likely to buy from a company.
The same concept applies to businesses with an international presence; they may discover physical visits from those outside of a country (i.e., tourists) or digital visits from other countries.
Aside from this sort of perspective, global surveys bring other kinds of value and importance for a variety of studies. The following lists the ways these surveys are both practical and advantageous.
- They can be applied to all six of the main types of research
- This involves retrospective, cross-sectional, longitudinal and perspectives studies.
- They provide ease of access to segments that would be otherwise unreachable.
- This is especially the case for mail-out surveys and phone interviews, which would be far more expensive and difficult to execute.
- A study run by these surveys may reveal results that can apply, or at the very least, be tested on similar target demographics in the domestic sphere.
- They can be used as instruments of comparisons for the same demographics that live in different countries.
- Ex: Irish American middle-aged men versus Irish middle-aged men living in Ireland
- They help cater to the individuality of specific markets.
- They allow businesses to understand cultural matters in a firsthand way.
- They allow businesses to learn how those abroad view key events and products in their home country.
- They bring ambitious research projects in-house.
- They present a critical stage in market research for companies seeking to bring their business abroad.
- This includes keeping a business’s headquarters domestic, but shipping to other countries.
- They allow businesses to obtain international thought leadership.
All in all, international surveys ensure that businesses and researchers meet their international research goals.
How Global Surveys Were Used for a Major Research Project
Global surveys are often conducted for major research undertakings such as the Social Media & COVID-19 global study among Generation Z and Millenials, which was conducted as a joint study by the World Health Organization, two other organizations and performed entirely on the Pollfish platform.
In this global research study, surveys were deployed across 24 countries in an effort to understand how the younger generation consumes COVID-19-related news. As such, these surveys were used as a vehicle for understanding how fake news around a major topic forms.
The study wound up uncovering the presence of an “Infodemic,” that is, unproven claims, rumors and generally false information spreading about the coronavirus pandemic. The infodemedic was itself a kind of epidemic, as false information spreads at lightning speed online.
Thus, this global research study explored where Gen Z and Millennials get their COVID-19 news, who they regard as trusted sources and what their awareness levels are of fake news. Additionally, the study examined their COVID-related concerns and dug into the size of their social media accounts, including their likelihood of sharing unverified information.
This provided concrete information and data for two additional actors in this study: Wunderman Thompson and the University of Melbourne (Australia). This data provided marketing content for these two actors, which other brands can take advantage of, should they use global surveys from a robust online survey provider.
In order to forge strong global research and market research studies, the online survey platform that researchers use must provide various capabilities and relentless quality. The Pollfish whitepaper on the WHO Social Media and COVID-19 study provides a detailed look into how its platform did just that.
The Key Ingredients of a Successful Global Survey Study
In order to reap the benefits of global market research, there are several things researchers will need to apply in their global surveys. First off, the platform you use should allow survey deployment to virtually all countries.
You never know when you’ll need to study a specific geographic market, thus it is best to use a platform that offers an international reach.
The surveys should allow you to conduct the study in the language appropriate to the country (i.e., users) that they'll be sent to digitally. While researchers will be hard-pressed to find a platform that offers survey creation in all languages, it is key to be able to have access to numerous languages as opposed to merely English, Spanish and a handful of other most-spoken languages.
A strong online survey platform — such as Pollfish — offers researchers the capability of creating surveys in 46 languages.
Given that global survey campaigns can be difficult to organize, other aspects of the survey process must be simplified. For example, researchers ought to be given a reasonable completion time of their global surveys. This way, they’ll be aware of the approximate length of the survey and be able to execute time management.
Finally, there are the more technical aspects of the surveys that are just as important (if not more so) in a global campaign as they are in a national one. The surveys should offer relentless quality assurance.
These include offering a granular data filtering system, a mobile-first approach to the surveys in keeping with the current age SaaS integrations, applying the random device engagement (RDE) method to draw the most relevant and quality respondents and other features.
Relying on Continuous Global Support
Global surveys can help businesses gain insights to international markets for a vast array of purposes, whether it be for content strategy, gaining original insights, understanding another segment of your target market or other needs.
However, not all global surveys are built in the same fashion, thus, they don’t all offer the same capabilities. The power of these surveys rests in the online survey platform that hosts them.
Researchers must pay keen attention to all the functionalities of an online survey platform before deciding on the one that can provide optimal quality in global surveys and all matters pertaining to carrying out the research.
A suitable survey tool such as Pollfish, will offer global support, so that you can create, deploy and analyze global surveys with ease without incurring higher costs. Pollfish offers the same costs regardless of the surveys’ targeted countries, fielding research to 160 countries at scale and at speed.
Surveys are available in 46 different languages and include the Translate Survey feature, which makes reaching non-English speakers a seamless process.
Pollfish uses the random device engagement or RDE methodology, a top-notch method for extracting customer data by reaching global digital users in their natural digital environments; this includes some of the most visited websites and apps.
With global support offered around the clock and a strong online survey platform that uses machine learning to remove poor quality data, Pollfish is the most ideal survey platform.
How Explanatory Research Helps You Succeed in Business
How Explanatory Research Helps You Succeed in Business
Explanatory research is a necessary part of the overall research process. It is especially potent when researchers come across a problem that was not well-researched before.
It is formed to allow researchers to become better acquainted with a certain topic, one that was already established at the basic level — the exploratory level to be specific. As such, explanatory research follows exploratory research in the overarching process.
A kind of descriptive research, it provides insight into a certain subject and allows it to be further probed. In fact, it is designed to be the earliest form of descriptive research.
This article expounds on explanatory research, what defines it, its use to businesses, how to conduct it and much more.
Defining Explanatory Research
Explanatory research is a research design intended to explain, as its name suggests, the different aspects of your research study. In this stage of the research process, researchers study what they’ve already identified in exploratory research.
As such, explanatory research provides further details from an established groundwork of study in the previous stage. It is bent on uncovering a problem, phenomenon or occurrence in greater depth.
The subject of the study is not entirely barren of research, as some details exist, but they are minor and require additional research. Researchers ought to be able to adapt to the new information they will come by when conducting exploratory research.
Rather than providing conclusive results around a topic, it enables the researcher to garner insights in the “how” and “why” of the subject at hand.
The following enumerates the defining characteristics of this kind of research:
The Key Aspects of Explanatory Research
In order to conduct explanatory research properly and reap all of its benefits, researchers need to understand its makeup. There are various facets that comprise this kind of research; thus you should be aware of all of them, as this will ensure you conduct it correctly.
In addition, since this kind of research is a kind of descriptive research, it is crucial to be able to tell it apart from its parent category, as it is a distinct form of research.
The following enumerates the defining characteristics of this kind of research:
- The purpose is to increase the understanding of a topic and/or its subtopics.
- Its nature is that of qualitative research, as it seeks discovery of the “why” surrounding the problem/ phenomenon.
- It does not provide conclusive results.
- Given its qualitative nature, it does not prove statistical significance.
- It relies on using both secondary and primary sources of information, with a particular bent on secondary information, as it is already available, thus helping researchers understand key aspects without pursuing their own research just yet.
- The issue in this kind of research is not obviously characterized (in the beginning of it).
- It requires the researcher to become versed in the topic under examination.
- It can be used to form theories and hypotheses.
- It is used before delving into other descriptive research, such as that which focuses on gathering quantitative data.
- This research completes the bedrock of research from exploratory research, as it is needed before completing any subsequent research, such as correlational or experimental research.
Why Your Business Needs Explanatory Research
Explanatory research provides several benefits for market researchers and for the business sphere in general. First off, it completes a missing gap in the overall research process, specifically in descriptive research.
This is due to the fact that explanatory research aims at going beyond describing; rather it is focused on explaining. This involves gathering key insights that form the major ideas behind other forms of research.
Although explanatory research is not scientific like its causal and experimental research counterparts, it peers into cause and effect relationships in that it identifu=ies their scope and nature.
As such, businesses must perform explanatory research to evaluate the impacts of certain changes to standards, processes, techniques, etc.
Moreover, a business can better understand opportunities and threats when incorporating explanatory. Immersing into the specifics of a problem in greater depth allows businesses to understand what needs to be prioritized, decide on what needs to be studied in more depth in correlational, causal or experimental research, and infer on ways to mitigate or resolve an issue.
All in all, a business can benefit from explanatory research when it has an issue that:
- researchers can use to explain why a phenomenon occurs
- was identified in exploratory research,
- was unknown about prior
- was not well investigated before
An Example of Explanatory Research for Business
Market researchers can apply explanatory research to explain why a phenomenon takes place, which they can use to predict future occurrences. Thus, it goes beyond finding descriptions alone and can be conducted either before or following descriptive research.
The following is an example of how a business can use this research:
An electronics business may seek to understand all the factors that contribute to customer satisfaction, in the wake of new product additions. The business would weigh each factor against one another to see how to increase satisfaction along with increasing sales.
As such, the business turns to the various methods to conduct explanatory research, such as using:
- Literature research (secondary)
- Studying each issue in-depth via field research (primary)
- Case study research (secondary but can be primary if it is generated via your own research)
- Random sampling surveys
The explanatory research that the electronics company conducted would reveal how the different factors are contributing to customer satisfaction, if they can extend to other areas and how they can be used to bolster sales.
This research can also look into cause and effect relationships or suspected cause and effect relationships that can be further explored in causal research.
The electronics business discovers that certain new items can be delivered more quickly, thus creating more customer happiness. The company then uses this knowledge to reengineer its shipping, handling and returns process so that it is more efficient.
Explanatory Research Survey Examples
Explanatory research goes a long way in building effective survey studies, as surveys provide a key source of primary research. Explanatory studies are best suited using random sampling methods to avoid survey bias.
Here are a few survey types that researchers can use for this kind of study:
- The qualitative survey
- Helps answer the what, why and how with open-ended questions.
- Obtains the respondents’ explanations needed for this research.
- The customer experience survey
- Helps businesses study variables that contribute to or result from certain kinds of customer experiences.
- Allows businesses to test CX in relation to the responses from this survey.
- The customer satisfaction survey
- Especially useful when bringing new products/services into the market to compare them with previous ones.
- Features 4 subtypes of unique surveys.
- The concept testing survey
- Ideal for researching new concepts or those identified in exploratory research.
- Can be used for various aspects of business.
- The panel survey
- Part of longitudinal studies, it studies the same sample pool over a period of time.
- Provides an explanatory angle, as it gains continual observations on different variables.
How Explanatory Research Differs from Correlational, Exploratory, Descriptive and Causal Research
Explanatory research differs from exploratory, descriptive and correlational research in self-evident ways.
However, it is often confused with exploratory studies. Both of these forms of research are conducted early in the entire research process. However, they differ in several ways.
Exploratory research aims to identify the very foundation of a research problem. It also clarifies problems and forms hypotheses.
Explanatory research, on the other hand, aims to explain issues and come across possible cause and effect relationships to explore later. It also finds theories that can test hypotheses in causal or experimental research.
Although this is a kind of descriptive research, it is a distinct kind and cannot be categorized under all descriptive studies. This is because descriptive research involves studying metrics such as the average, mean, median and frequency.
As such, it is far more quantitative in nature than is explanatory research, which aims to explain, thus, it gathers qualitative research. Additionally, explanatory research is designated to explain rather than solely describe.
Causal research involves finding the cause-and-effect relationships between variables and while explanatory research looks into cause and effect, it does not employ experimentation as does causal research.
Experimental research is fully science and experiment-based and completely divergent from explanatory research. It works to prove or disprove a hypothesis via a scientific approach. example used in the previous selection).
Correlational research, which is also focused on observation and does not apply any alterations or conditioning to the variables, focuses on observing the relationships between variables. Explanatory research, on the other hand, involves studying various aspects and issues.
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Explanatory Research
There are various benefits to applying explanatory research to your research process. However, it also carries a few setbacks. As a researcher, or someone interested in using research to advance business, you ought to know both.
The Advantages
- It allows researchers to discover deeper insight into virtually any topic.
- Deeper insights provide more subtopics and specific issues to be studied in further research.
- It helps identify new business opportunities, as well as latent threats.
- It can help you learn more about your competition whether it is direct or indirect.
- It is flexible in the sources it uses: from focus groups, to various literature, to surveying, to field research and more.
- It creates a higher level of internal validity due to the systematic selection of subjects.
- It reveals the reasons behind a wide scope of processes and occurrences.
- It can evaluate the effect of change on existing norms.
- It is flexible in terms of configuration as well, as it can be conducted after exploratory research or without the need for exploratory research, as well as prior to or following descriptive research.
- Findings can help guide correlational and causal research.
The Disadvantages
- It is not at all conclusive.
- Sample sizes tend to be modest, which is not ideal for a targeted/ specific type of audience.
- It can fall prey to the researcher’s bias with little to no experimentation involved.
- Not all secondary sources are updated and fitting for conducting new research into a previously scarcely-researched topic.
How to Conduct Explanatory Research
Explanatory research is often conducted early on in the research process, typically following exploratory research, although it can be the very first form of research. Since this form of research intends to explain, it can be at times difficult to conduct, or know when you’ve gathered enough information.
The following explains the key steps required to successfully perform explanatory research.
- Find a key issue you discovered in exploratory research.
- Or, you may begin by looking at current issues with little details to them.
- Begin by looking at high-level aspects of an issue by conducting secondary research. Use the following:
- Online literature
- Case studies
- Competitor websites
- Statistics websites
- Then, begin your primary research. It can exist in a number of ways.
- You can perform an in-depth study on each issue and/or phenomenon by zeroing in on secondary sources, or moving on to primary research.
- Use a focus group or interview to understand the subjects involved in the topic of study.
- If you detect any missing information you’d like to pursue, go further by conducting surveys.
- Surveys round off the research process, as they provide unique insights into your customers and prospects.
- Organize your findings into various documents and begin your survey analysis.
Opening New Possibilities
Researchers can discover new possibilities for their study with explanatory research, and the same applies to businesses and market researchers.
While it is not conclusive, this kind of research helps brands understand a situation, occurrence or customer behavior in greater depth. Additionally, it helps researchers refine the hypotheses they’ve made in exploratory research and can even predict future events.
As such, businesses have plenty to gain from conducting this form of qualitative research, which complements descriptive research. A robust survey platform can help bring explanatory research into life, easing the process when combing through cumbersome internet research.
Avoiding Burnout with the Employee Burnout Survey
Avoiding Burnout with the Employee Burnout Survey
The employee burnout survey is a key employee feedback survey that can help reduce the undesirable, yet frequently recurring phenomenon known as employee burnout.
As a business, you are probably well aware of the need to survey your target market. Although lesser-known and thus less often used, surveying employees to reduce burnout is a valuable method to keep your employees happy and your team intact.
While your customers are your bread and butter, your employees are the vessels that steer your ship, aka, your business to success. As such, it is key to pay attention to their needs and concerns as you would with your target market.
Implementing surveys can help achieve these goals, so that your business doesn’t suffer from high burnout rates.
This article explores the employee burnout survey, how it can reduce and avoid employee burnout, keep employees engaged, how to set one up and more.
Defining Employee Burnout
Employee burnout refers to the state of work-induced or work-related stress that many if not all employees endure from time to time. This condition is marked by a state of either or both physical and mental exhaustion, accompanied by a reduced sense of accomplishment and lack of motivation.
Although burnout isn’t a medical diagnosis, it takes a visible toll on employees, as it deters them from performing their best and being content in their job.
There are many factors that contribute to employee burnout, most of them occur due to the overall work environment.
The Causes of Employee Burnout
Employees can deal with many tasks; these can increase if another employee is on PTO, leaves the company or there is a lack of talent available. As such, there are several issues that can go awry or contribute to employee burnout.
Here are several causes of employee burnout:
- Lack of support on the job: Often, some kind of support is expected from higher-ups, managers and other employees. When an employee feels that they are lacking support, it can make them feel isolated and depressed, bleeding into their work performance.
- Lack of resources: Some jobs require ancillary tasks in addition to employees’ main jobs, yet not all workplaces provide the full resources to complete them. For example, let’s say an employee needs to hire freelancers, but does not have the means. This clearly hampers their ability to carry out their job, leading to burnout.
- Unclear job expectations: Often due to a lack of communication or proper input, some employees may discover they have responsibilities or subtasks that were not made clear to them. In turn, the employee suffers, as they won’t meet expectations, at least not as soon as an employer or the employee themselves would aim for.
- Toxic employees: Some employees may bully, ignore or treat others in an unkind way. This behavior is unpleasant and can lead to feelings of rejection and loneliness, along with heaps of stress.
- Tight deadlines: While most projects have deadlines, there are many occurrences that can delay progress, therefore hampering the meeting of deadlines. As such, it can cause burnout, which further delays job completion.
- Little to no work-life balance: When work consumes so much of employees’ time that they can barely fit anything else (doctors’ visits, time with loved ones, etc.), they become overwhelmed. It is perturbing to be overcome with work to the point where employees cannot live a well-balanced life.
- Overworking: One of the major causes of employee burnout is overworking. Whether or not employees are meeting deadlines, sometimes, the volume of the work becomes overbearing. This creates exhaustion and a feeling of depletion within employees.
The Many Consequences of Employee Burnout for Your Business
If the damaging effects of employee burnout weren’t incisive enough in the Defining Employee Burnout Section, the following will.
Employee burnout reached a new high in 2020 and is showing no signs of abating just yet. This is detrimental to businesses and not just at an employee level. This can become an HR nightmare, as burned-out employees tend to leave their job.
The most grave consequence of employee burnout is its effect on employee retention: 42% of workers quit their job due to employee burnout. The statistic grows to almost 50% when it concerns burned-out millennials.
Here are a few other consequences of employee burnout for businesses:
- Unmotivated and indifferent employees, who care little about the success of the company.
- Irritable attitudes that create more hostility and toxicity in the workplace
- Exhaustion that leads to underperformance
- Inclinations towards sarcasm, anger or confrontation
- Absenteeism on the job or in job culture activities
- Bad reviews on the internet about your work culture and overall company
- High turnover requiring more recruiting efforts and the loss of valuable employees
- A bad reputation of your business
Evidently, businesses ought to steer clear of employee burnout and distinguish it at every turn. Surveys can help fulfill this goal.
Understanding the Employee Burnout Survey
The employee burnout survey, as its name suggests, is a type of survey meant to identify and gauge employee burnout, along with any occurrences or sentiments that can contribute to burnout.
Detecting the latter can help prevent employees from developing full-fledged burnout, as the insights this survey provides help employers and HR workers foster positive change.
As for the latter, this survey can help extinguish existing employee burnout, so that it does not become incendiary enough to cause employees to quit.
As such, this survey is a kind of employee feedback survey, as it gathers employee commentary, critique and the like — but specifically themed around employee burnout.
This kind of survey can be explicitly configured around the theme of employee burnout, that is, introducing respondents to this topic, with questions that specifically mention this topic. Or, it can be set up more implicitly, with the topic and term reframed, thus not mentioned directly.
The latter is useful when you aim to be more discreet, as some employees may feel uncomfortable with plainly disclosing their feelings of discomfort and burnout from work.
How to Set Up an Employee Burnout Survey
You can set up an employee burnout survey by either of the two main methods described in the previous section. To understand your employees better and minimize burnout, it is useful to regularly conduct these surveys.
You can begin with the first method (explicitly mentioning employee burnout) and then deploy these surveys more secretly using the second method (not mentioning the term) — or the other way around, or with any cadence and frequency you choose.
Since both of these survey methods are based on employee burnout, you’ll find that some questions can be applied to both or used interchangeably.
How to Set up an Explicit Employee Burnout Survey
Your survey should have a callout that specifically states that the survey is themed on/ measures employee burnout. This way, employees will understand this outright.
Here are the key questions to include in this employee burnout survey method:
- Have you ever experienced burnout in this job?
- Answers: [Yes, No]
- If yes, add an open-ended question to probe further and allow employees to describe their burnout experiences.
- What is/are the most stressful aspect(s) of your position/ working at [company name]?
- Answer examples: [Time management, work overload, other ideas to maintain objectives, difficulty maintaining my objectives, issues with another worker, etc.]
- Use skip logic to transfer any answer to an open-ended question that asks to elaborate on this.
- What could we do to help you diminish employee burnout?
- Answer examples: [Lessen the workload, create more collaborations, offer more mentorship, other]
- Add an open-ended answer option to understand exactly what employees need.
- Have you ever taken a sick day due to employee burnout?
- Answers: [Yes, No]
- If yes, use skip logic to route employees to multiple-choice, multiple selection questions to tick off all reasons as to why they did so.
- Add an option for an open-ended answer at this step.
- How many days have you worked during after-hours or off days because you could not finish during work hours?
- Answers: Never
- 1-3 days
- 4-6 days
- Over 6 days
How to Set up an Implicit Employee Burnout Survey
If you want to discover the presence of employee burnout in a stealthy manner, avoid using the term throughout the survey.
Even if the survey is anonymous, employees still may feel uncomfortable divulging their feelings in relation to employee burnout for fear of losing their jobs or being frowned upon by their managers.
Here are the key questions to include in this burnout survey method:
- Have you ever come upon any stress in this job?
- Answers: [Yes, No]
- If yes, add an open-ended question to probe further and allow employees to describe their experiences via the keyword “stress” as opposed to burnout.
- How often do you experience stress on the job?
- Answers: Seldom
- Every now and then
- Once a month
- Several times a month
- Several times a week
- Allow employees to elaborate on how they experience stress and its frequency in an open-ended question following this one.
- What is/are the most stressful aspect(s) of your position/ working at [company name]?
- Answer examples: [Time management, work overload, other ideas to maintain objectives, difficulty maintaining my objectives, issues with another worker, etc.]
- Use skip logic to transfer any answer to an open-ended question that asks to elaborate on this.
- What could we do to help you feel happier at work?
- Use an open-ended answer option to understand exactly what employees need, as this question is too broad.
- How many days have you worked during after-hours or off days because you could not finish during work hours?
- Answers: Never
- 1-3 days
- 4-6 days
- Over 6 days
Improving All Work-Related Issues
Like all work-related issues, employee burnout is a work in progress. Even when you’ve reined in employee burnout (you would know this via survey campaigns) it can creep back up again.
This is because the workplace — or work hours — if your team works remotely, is a living environment. Personalities may clash, new assignments may come unexpectedly (especially if you produce work for clients) workloads may waver and there is nothing that can fully suppress surprises, be they good or bad.
Therefore, you need to evaluate your employees on a regular basis to ensure that they are satisfied at work, feel appreciated and aren’t affected by burnout, let alone overwhelmed by it. The most effective and insights-driven way to accomplish this is by deploying employee burnout surveys on a powerful online survey platform.
Content Marketing Questions to Improve Your Content Strategy
Content Marketing Questions to Improve Your Content Strategy
Content marketing questions form the bedrock of a content marketing strategy that uses survey studies as a means of primary research. It is the questions themselves that make up the core of a survey, so they must be relevant to the content marketing studies you conduct.
Survey data that is gathered using content marketing questions can provide vital information about your users’ needs and opinions so you can create content that drives traffic, and conversions along with fostering customer loyalty.
Content marketing questions can be used to ensure your company’s content is meeting the needs of your audience. Additionally, these questions can be used before planning your content marketing strategy and initiating content creation efforts to the likelihood that your materials will be well-received by your audience.
The right content marketing questions can make a major difference in the success of your content strategy. This article provides several content marketing questions to get you acquainted with your first content marketing strategy survey.
Questions on Your Audience's Pain Points and Needs
It is important to provide content that addresses the needs of your prospective customers. Whether they are simply in the exploratory phases or actively looking to purchase your company’s product or services, the appropriate content can guide them in the right direction.
By understanding your audience’s pain points and needs, your team can create content that will address these needs and, ideally, mitigate pain points before they occur. Here are some content marketing questions to ask:
- What types of content would be most helpful to you when considering a new [insert product or service category here] for your company?
- Multiple choice: Deeper explanations of product features, descriptions of technical requirements, high-level overview of the product, and explanations of how the product/service can improve internal processes.
- Or, use a text entry field to allow for open responses.
- How important are each of the following content types to your business?
- Matrix response: In the first column, list existing content publications that your business provides. Across the top, the options can be: Very important, important, somewhat important, or not important.
- Based on your current workload, do you have time to stay abreast of developments in your industry by consuming content (for example, articles, videos, or podcasts)?
- Binary: Yes, no
- How much time per day do you currently spend learning about new products or technology?
- Multiple choice: (0-30 minutes/week, 30-60 minutes/week,1-2 hours/week, more than 2 hours/week)
Questions on How Content Influences Content Consumption Behavior
At the end of the day, we want our customers to read and enjoy our content in the hopes that they will eventually make a purchase or recommend our company to a friend. This can be harder to research since it may involve actions that occur offline and are thus difficult to track.
By asking the right content marketing questions, however, you can learn how your content may or may not currently influence offline behavior. By understanding this, you can formulate relevant and compelling content in the future. Questions to ask include:
- Have you ever purchased from a company after consuming a free publication that was offered to you?
- Binary response: Yes, no
- Please indicate which of our content broadcasts you currently subscribe to:
- Multiple choice with multiple selections allowed: Podcasts, blog, newsletter, YouTube channel, Instagram channel, Facebook page
- How likely are you to recommend business content to a friend or colleague?
- If you use Net Promoter Score, the response should be provided on a scale of 1- 10 (10 being the highest).
- Alternately, the response can be multiple choice: I often recommend your content, I may recommend your content if I see something interesting, I am unlikely to recommend your content
Questions to Understand the Impact of Content on User Decision-Making
The purpose of content marketing is to improve the visibility of the products and services your company offers, while enhancing the “know, like, and trust factors” that make it more likely for a prospect to convert.
To provide content that is likely to have a positive impact on decision-making, you must know the kinds of content your target audience craves, along with the kinds that drive it away.
Try asking the following content marketing questions to enhance your content creation process:
- Did the video series we delivered to you help support your decision to purchase our product?
- Binary: Yes, I decided to purchase after watching the videos, No, I did not find the videos helpful.
- Did this article help you understand the difference between our subscription tiers?
- Binary: Yes, no
- Of the following content publications that we have available on our website, please select the most appropriate response for each one.
- Use a matrix. In the first column, list out the publications available to consumers (e.g.: white papers, help manuals, videos showing how the product is used). Across the top, write out options such as: I did not use this, I read/watched this and found it helpful, I read/watched this and found it lacking.
- What content format are you most likely to use when researching a new product or services?
- Multiple choice: Blog posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, infographics, webinars
- Matrix response: List out content types in the first column. Label the rows across the top: Very likely to consult, Likely to consult, Very unlikely to consult, Definitely would not consult
Questions about Published Content
Content can be used to enhance the overall public perception of your business or industry. To create content that addresses existing concerns or highlights your company as an industry leader, you should ask content marketing questions about their existing opinion of content that has been published. Questions to ask include:
- Please select the appropriate response to indicate how you feel about the following content formats:
- Use a matrix to list existing or proposed content formats (e.g. blog posts, white papers, newsletters, videos, podcasts, etc.) in the first column. Then across the top, use responses such as: Love them / Like them / Neither like nor dislike / Dislike them / Hate them.
- How do you feel about our interactive content?
- Multiple choice: I find interactive content interesting and educational, I think interactive content is fun, but not very informative, I don’t enjoy interactive content.
- Which devices do you currently use to consume content? Select all that apply.
- Multiple-choice with multiple selections allowed: Smartphone, computer, tablet, eReader, MP3 player.
- What other types of content would you like to see our company publish?
- Text entry field.
Use Surveys to Enhance Content Marketing Efforts
Content marketing surveys are one of the most exciting ways to gauge the success and potential of your existing content marketing efforts, along with dictating how to successfully build new ones. As such, all businesses should consider making routine surveys part of their ongoing content marketing plan.
This allows you to routinely check in with your audience to ensure your efforts are on track or course-correct as needed. The use of online survey platforms makes it easier than ever to connect with your audience and gain this valuable information.
You can simplify your efforts by choosing a strong survey platform that allows you to auto-generate questions based on content that your audience has viewed.
Whether you decide to conduct a comprehensive content marketing survey before you create a content plan or deploy surveys on a routine basis, the right content marketing questions will yield valuable information that can guide your efforts.
Frequently asked questions
What are some types of content marketing questions that researchers can use?
Researchers can use content marketing questions as multiple-choice questions to better understand product features or descriptions of technical requirements. They can also be used as matrix responses, binary responses, or open-ended questions.
Why are content marketing questions important in market research?
Businesses want their content to convince customers to make a purchase or create brand awareness. However, it can be challenging to track such actions as many marketing efforts occur offline too. Therefore, businesses can learn how content may or may not influence offline customer behaviors with the right content marketing questions.
What questions about published content should researchers ask?
Content marketing questions should address customers' experiences, preferences, likes, and dislikes as they pertain to the content. The questions in this kind of survey should ask respondents about their opinions on content that has already been published, whether recently, or long ago.
How does content impact users' decision-making?
Content marketing aims to increase your company offerings' visibility while enhancing the "trust, like and know factors" that increase prospects' chances to convert. To provide valuable content that can impact decision-making positively, it is imperative to be aware of the kinds of content that your intended audience craves, along with the types that drive them away.
How can surveys enhance content marketing efforts?
When it comes to gauging the success of your content marketing efforts, surveys are an excellent way of discovering your prospective customers’ potential, dictating how to attract them better. Additionally, you can streamline your efforts by selecting a robust survey platform that enables you to automatically generate questions depending on the content that your visitors have viewed. This also presents you with an opportunity to frequently check in with your customer base to make sure that your efforts are going as planned, making it easier than ever to interact with your audience and get valuable insights.