Everything You Can Do with Market Research Online Surveys

If you’ve ever begged the question, what can you do with market research online surveys? — we’ve got but one key response:

More like, what can’t you do with online market research surveys? 

These digital tools gain you a wide range of insights into virtually anything about your target market or any target audience you intend to study.

You can apply them to any research project, as they grant you data on past campaigns (think existing ads, products or service sessions), as well as prepare you before you take any new action for your business.

Given that market research surveys have so many purposes, survey data remains important for both small and large businesses.

It is thus hardly surprising that the market research industry has grown 3.6% per year between 2017 and 2022 in the US on average. After all, it wouldn’t grow if businesses stopped relying on it.

This article gives you a deep dive into market research online surveys, what they entail, their importance and all of their applications.   

Understanding Market Research Online Surveys

An online market research survey is both a major method and tool for conducting market research, which is the practice of studying your target market, the group of customers most likely to buy from your business.

Market research entails researching your target market and other customer segments in full depth, thereby understanding who they are, their needs, desires, preferences, aversions and more. 

There are various forms of research, such as scientific, medical, socioeconomic, etc. A market research survey is a tool designed specifically for conducting market research, as its name suggests. 

As such, it should include all the features necessary for researchers to learn what’s driving customer sentiment, market demand and a slew of other customer concerns. 

An online market research survey is the modern form of a market research survey and market research at large. That’s because it is conducted online in an automated way, completes all quotas and grants you the swiftest and most accurate way to pull customer data. 

Unlike other forms of conducting market research, online surveys allow you to get to the heart of the matter on virtually any topic. But there’s much more they can do, provided you use a strong survey platform. 

When it comes to these surveys, the possibilities are endless. 

What You Can Do with a Market Research Online Survey Platform

Most online market research surveys are conducted through an online survey platform. Such a platform allows researchers to partake in every part of the survey process. 

However, keep in mind that all survey platforms are built differently, with different features and levels of respondent outreach. 

The following outlines what you can do with an online survey platform:

1. Target your respondents.
2. Set all respondent qualifications.
3. Create screening questions to further determine eligibility.
4. Set quotas, the number of completed surveys and multiple audiences per survey.
5. Create the survey questions, i.e., the questionnaire.
6. Offer a variety of survey templates to align with various market research campaigns.
7. Create disclaimers, introductions and thank you pages.
8. Allow you to use a variety of question types.
9. Send your survey to a vast network of digital publishers randomly.
10. Allow you to send your survey to specific digital spaces and people. 

In all, an online survey platform allows you to create and administer surveys, thus also working as a survey distribution service. 

A powerful survey platform enables your online survey to perform a variety of tasks, which we cover further down this article. But first, let’s learn about the importance of these surveys. 

The Importance of Market Research Online Surveys

Given all that we’ve already discussed that these surveys are capable of, you’ve probably caught on to their importance.

However, there are so many other reasons why market research online surveys are a must for your business, regardless of its stage, its brand reputation and other factors.

Firstly, these surveys form a critical aspect of your business strategy. This involves strategizing all things business-related, from understanding the reception to a new product, to how a support session was perceived. 

With this knowledge in tow, you’ll be informed on how to make further business decisions and run different campaigns. Thus, you’ll be less likely to make major mistakes that will affect your bottom line, while delighting your customers. 

Online market research surveys allow you to remain competitive, no matter how many players are in your industry, and how big (or small) your market share is. In fact, conducting these surveys is the answer to how to increase market share, as it helps you carry out productive campaigns. 

These surveys are not just tools for gathering data, instead, they are also data visualizers, presenting your data in a variety of formats. This is especially important when you need to analyze survey data and use it to create a report, a whitepaper or any other type of research asset. 

As data visualization tools, they also reduce and organize large amounts of information allowing you to easily compare two or more sets of data. This will depend on the data filtering capabilities of your online survey. 

In addition, these surveys also allow you to uncover things not only in relation to your customers but your own business. You’ll therefore be able to learn things you would never have otherwise without this survey type. 

That’s because this survey allows you to understand exactly how your customer base views your brand, how often they think about it, what they’d like to improve, what they dislike and so much more.

By understanding your customers in great depth, you won’t simply form better marketing, advertising and other business campaigns. You’ll also build stronger relationships with your customers, which fosters consumer loyalty. 

Loyalty is the bedrock of customer retention, which is more important than customer acquisition. There are many reasons behind this, including the fact that the chances of converting existing customers are 60 -70%. The probability of converting a new customer is only 5- 20%.

Thus, by studying your customers with this survey, you’ll be able to understand them well, thus better appealing and catering to customers, strengthening your relationship. In turn, you’re building loyalty, allowing you to increase your customer retention rate. 

Market research online surveys don’t merely allow you to understand how customers view your business, but your competitors as well. In this way, you can obtain all the competitive research you need simply by conducting such a survey.

All in all, these surveys are extremely important for all business affairs, as they help measure the representativeness of customer views and needs. The intelligence you gain from them allows you to make crucial decisions.

What You Can Study with Market Research Online Surveys

As mentioned, there are a myriad of things you can study with these surveys. As such, you can apply them to specific areas of business, including specific campaigns and macro applications. 

As such, here we lay out several main purposes of conducting online market research surveys. As you can see, these are high-level and have many sub-methods and applications. 

1. General Marketing: Marketing involves all the activities performed to aid a business sell its products/services, which includes educating customers, interacting with them and more. Marketing market research exists to help businesses gauge their campaign efficacy and better understand how their customers view various campaigns. 
2. Advertising: Used to deploy sponsored messages to grow demand and elicit purchases, advertising, you can leverage it to influence customer behavior. This involves prompting existing customers to make more purchases or to gain new customers. Surveys can be used to determine which advertising messages are the most resonant and which ads elicit the most interest. You can ask questions to compare ads and their different parts. 
3. Branding: This discipline involves creating a reputation, an image and a set of associations around a brand. Branding market research helps brands differentiate themselves from one another and form a style unique to a company. Businesses can tie these surveys to branding by using them to test new logos, slogans, value propositions, content ideas and more.
4. Market Segmentation: Market segmentation is a macro-application that refers to dividing a target market into smaller segments and assigning certain values to each segment to better understand all your customers. That’s because a target market includes all the customers most likely to buy from a particular business and is not solely defined by one group. Researchers can create questions about their target market’s habits, lifestyles, preferences and more to distill them into several segments. From there, marketers can adopt different marketing campaigns for each segment. 
5. PR: Public Relations, or PR, as it is commonly referred to, aims to control the distribution and spread of information about a company (or individual) and the public. Its goal is to control the narrative of a business or organization to gain positive public perception. These surveys can help by asking questions on how well respondents know a business and their general thoughts on its operations, products, experiences, performance, etc. Researchers can also test out press release ideas and pitches through these surveys. 
6. Brand Tracking: Brand tracking refers to continuously measuring or tracking, as its name suggests, your brand’s health. This involves analyzing how your customers buy and use your products and what they think and feel about the brand itself. These sentiments are subject to change, especially when things change at a business, whether they have a new ad campaign, have been acquired or are offering new products. You can keep watch of this with these surveys.
7. Brand Awareness: This goes beyond whether or not your target market has heard of your brand. Brand awareness also deals with the extent to which customers are able to recall or recognize your brand under various conditions and circumstances. A strong brand awareness is necessary to build long-lasting relationships with existing customers, as well as draw in the interest of new and potential customers.

Specific Market Research Endeavors to Study with Market Research Online Surveys

In the previous section, we discussed several broad campaigns, macro-applications and business topics that this survey type can support. Now, let’s move on to more specific usages of these kinds of surveys.

Here are some of the more specific purposes a market research online survey campaign helps serve:

1. Understand the makeup of your target market.
   1. You can use this survey to form a target market analysis.
   2. It will allow you to understand all the needs, concerns and behaviors of your target market and its segments.
2. Obtain customer feedback and get a deep read of your target market. 
   1. You can do so by centering the theme of this survey into that of a customer satisfaction survey.
      1. This includes forming it as the NPS, CSAT, CES, visual rating surveys & more
   2. Doing so allows you to understand your customers’ CLV (customer lifetime value).
3. Excel in product campaigns.
   1. Use it to test product satisfaction.
   2. Innovate products with new features and upgrades.
   3. Understand how your product compares with competitors’ offerings.
4. Avoid negative publicity.
   1. Use it to perform regular checks on the opinions of your brand.
   2. Uncover customer aversions to avoid using in your messaging and brand image.
5. Obtain employee feedback.
   1. Use it to run a pulse survey on your employees.
   2. Retain strong company morale by discovering your employees’ thoughts on their job training, roadmaps, pipelines, their boss and more.
6. Improve your CX.
   1. Use it to learn about your customer experience (CX). 
   2. This can involve all aspects of the customer buying journey.
7. Drive Lead generation.
   1. Use this survey for B2B endeavors.
   2. This will help you learn about the specific needs and desires of your target market, specifically your B2B clients such as partners, vendors and other business entities.
8. Acclimate with your niche.
   1. Use it to keep up with market and niche trends.
   2. Use it to produce a market trend analysis, so that you can analyze trends in an industry, including past and current market behavior, and dominant patterns of the market and its consumers.
   3. This makes it easier to change with the times.
9.  Complete a market analysis.
   1. Being able to compare your brand with others
   2. Getting a feel of the thoughts and attitudes in your overall space
10. Understand customer behaviors.
    1. Use it to create a customer behavior analysis. 
    2. Learn the motivations of customers, their lifestyles and how those affect their purchasing behavior.
    3. Create an RFM analysis to learn about your customers’ recency and frequency of purchases, along with their monetary value.
11. Understand your demographics.
    1. Use it to form a demographic analysis of your target market.
    2. This is one of the preliminary things you ought to know about your customers.
12. Understand your psychographics.
    1. Use it to create a psychographic analysis of your target market.
    2. This allows you to understand your customers’ psychological characteristics, such as their values, desires, goals, interests, fears, aversions and lifestyle choices.

What You Can Set Up with Market Research Online Surveys

Now that you understand the various macro-campaigns and applications to use with these surveys, along with the specific tasks you can apply them to, let’s dive into this survey type itself. 

There is plenty that you can set up with this survey type, along with key market research functions (more on the latter in the next section).

Thus, you’ll find several aspects of these surveys as you set them up. That’s because, as the previous section informed, you can use them to form specific market research survey types such as customer satisfaction surveys, etc.

Here is what you can set up within these surveys:

1. The questionnaire
   1. This is the heart of any survey, as it contains all the questions.
   2. You can build sophisticated survey paths with advanced skip logic, depending on the survey platform you use. These route respondents to different follow-up questions based on their previous answers.
2. Audience targeting
   1. This section involves adding all the respondent qualifications you seek to designate your survey audience.
   2. This section also contains your screener, to qualify people based on how they answer screening questions. 
   3. Some platforms will allow you to create multiple audiences per survey.
3. Distribution
   1. This dictates how you will distribute a survey to your target audience.
   2. There are two approaches to this on Pollfish:
      1. Random Device Engagement (RDE): A kind of organic sampling, RDE deploys surveys to a massive network of online sites, such as websites and apps. Respondents are targeted at random in their natural digital environments.
      2. Specific Online Channels and Respondents: You can also send surveys to the specific digital spaces you choose, such as your own website and social media with the Distribution Link feature. You can also send surveys to specific people via email with this link.
4. Data visualizations 
   1. There are various ways the survey can be presented. Within your survey results dashboard, you can view resultant data in the form of tables, graphs and charts.
   2. You can also view it via other visualizations, such as the kinds in imports like PDFs, Excel, CSV and Crosstabs. 
   3. You can also view data granularly, viewing how each demographic answered questions by filtering the resulting data.

What Research Capabilities Online Market Research Surveys Include

Lastly, let’s touch upon the market research capabilities that these surveys can carry out. Not all market research surveys have these capabilities, as not all survey platforms offer them.  

At Pollfish, we go beyond surveys. 

That’s because Pollfish is not just a survey platform; it provides a full-scale market research experience. That’s because we offer a wide scope of functionalities that the average survey platform simply doesn’t have. 

As such, you’ll find much more than merely survey creation on this platform. 

You’ll find the following market research capabilities on the online market research survey on the Pollfish platform:

1. A/B testing:
   1. You can conduct both Monadic A/B testing and sequential A/B testing. 
   2. Monadic A/B testing lets respondents choose their preferences for one concept or product they randomly receive out of many. These are what the researcher wants to test and compare, exposing the respondents to one concept instead of two or more at once.
   3. Focusing participants’ attention on just one concept at a time grants researchers insights into making product, pricing and various marketing decisions.
   4. Monadic testing is commonly used for gathering independent data for each stimulus — a contrast to comparison testing, where several stimuli are tested side-by-side.
   5. Sequential A/B testing uses concepts with a specific distribution: all possible combinations are derived from the concepts that are selected to be shown. 
   6. Thus, each concept is evenly distributed and presented to the respondents at equal times in the first position. 
   7. This reduces biases that may occur from serving a concept always at the first position of a combination.
2. Conjoint Analysis:
   1. A conjoint analysis allows researchers to gauge the value that customers place on different aspects of a product or service. 
   2. It shows exactly how your customers perceive the makeup of your offerings.
   3. It unveils the distinct advantages and imperfections of your product features.
   4. This method breaks a product or service down by its components, called attributes and levels. Researchers can test different combinations of the components to identify consumer preferences.
   5. You’ll get a rich evaluation of how your customers rate the unique features of a product, rather than passing a general judgment on it.
3. Maxdiff Analysis:
   1. Also called the Best-Worst Scale, a Maxdiff Analysis is a system for prioritizing new product ideas and customizing them to consumer preferences.
   2. Respondents choose the best and the worst option from a given set of options, which relate to a product and its features.
   3. Respondents rate a list of items by selecting only two of them — the complete opposite of each other, labeling one as the best of the list and one as the worst.
   4. This technique helps to identify what your target market values and what it despises.
4. The Van Westendorp Pricing Model:
   1. The Van Westendorp Price Sensitivity Meter is a pricing framework that provides data for decision-making in regard to consumer preferences on price. 
   2. The meter exists in the form of a graph, with ratings on price and value, presented as responses to survey questions that focus on the prices of different products and services.
   3. It is used to determine customers’ willingness to pay a range of prices.
   4. It allows businesses of different sizes and industries to set the proper prices of their offerings so that they can be in line with customer expectations.
   5. It helps conclude the prices that your target market deems acceptable, too high, too low and optimal.

Conducting Thorough Market Research

As you may have gathered, online market research surveys offer a vast amount of capabilities. As such, you can take on various macro-applications, specific tasks and projects by applying these kinds of surveys.

While these surveys offer a wide breadth of functionalities and insights, they are limited by the online survey platform that administers them. In essence, it is the survey platform that grants these surveys all their powers.

As aforementioned, not all survey platforms have the same features; thus, not all market research online surveys can offer all of the functionalities and features mentioned in this article.

Thus, you should select your survey platform carefully. 

Pollfish survey software allows you to create a thorough survey data collection, one you can customize to your liking, view however you please and organize to the max.

In addition, with our vast array of question types, you can create virtually any type of online market research survey to support your research campaigns.

Researchers can leverage a wide range of information on their respondents by accessing a wide pool of insights in their survey results dashboard.

In addition, we also offer the advanced skip logic feature, which routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers to a previous question. 

Thanks to our advanced market research platform, you can leverage the maximum number of market research capabilities with our online surveys.