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.
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.