Insider
by: Fausto Fratelli
Nov 09, 2021
 
5 min read

How to Harness DIY Market Research Surveys and Get Real Time Results – Fast

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What does an innovative DIY market research survey tool look like?

If you’re looking to gain agile customer insights for your brand in a short period of time, DIY market research surveys are a fantastic way forward.

Whether you need to test a concept or the development of a new product, gather thoughts and ideas around your latest creative campaign, or get an idea of how consumers perceive your brand, DIY surveys offer a more cost-effective, quick and company-wide solution than more traditional market or insights research project can provide.

With DIY surveys, however, there are several risks involved that may impact the outcome of your research – for example, the inclusion of biased or leading questions, or missing something entirely.

We’ve therefore outlined our top tips below on how to harness DIY market research surveys to avoid these outcomes and enable your brand to get fantastic real-time results – fast!

Recommended: What is Consumer Profiling?

5 tips for harnessing DIY market research surveys to gain real-time agile customer insights:

1. Choose the right survey platform – and explore it inside-out

Choosing the right survey platform is the first step to gaining fast and actionable brand and consumer insights.

After all, a platform that doesn’t meet the needs of your business or provide an enjoyable and straightforward experience for your team and respondents won’t get you the results you’re after, or in the rapid timescales you need!

We’ve written a blog on the 8 things your consumer insights tool of choice should include which can help you to make the best decision.

Once you have chosen your ideal platform to conduct market research surveys on, be sure you take the time to explore it thoroughly.

Find out the answers to questions such as:

  • What are the different question types the platform includes?
  • How many questions does the platform allow you to ask per survey?
  • What analytics tools are available, and how can you use them?

This will give you the chance to gain a full understanding of how you can utilise the platform to your greatest advantage before you make any headway with your research.

2. Set yourself clear goals for the research

Before you start writing your surveys, you need to establish what it is you’re hoping to discover.

For example, are you aiming to get an understanding of how your latest brand advertising campaign makes consumers feel? See how your brand is perceived against the competition? Get ideas for your latest product design? Or, simply find out what makes your ideal consumers tick?

Knowing what you are wanting to unearth from your project will enable you to write surveys in a way that will help you attain your goals quickly. What’s more, it means that your surveys will be clear and easy for your respondents to understand and complete!

3. Target the right audience

Although it may be initially quicker to target everyone available in your consumer database,
segmentation will ensure you get results faster – and that they will be more accurate!

For example, the OnePulse community breaks down into 60+ different demographics, meaning that you can target only those people who matter the most to your brand and business, and gather data that will have a more valuable impact on your business decisions.

With the OnePulse solution in particular, you can create private channels, should you wish to seek the opinions of the same audience on a regular basis!

4. Keep your surveys short

If you want insights fast, you need to enable your consumers to respond fast. And the best way to do this is by making your DIY market research surveys short!

At OnePulse, we have found that just three questions are enough to gain some truly eye-opening real-time results whilst simultaneously avoiding respondent fatigue and drop-out rates. Any more than five questions, and attention peters off more rapidly, and answers become less representative of your respondent’s true feelings.

If you want additional insights following your initial survey – in particular, if you want to get to the “why” of the matter – you can also retarget your initial audience.

For example, with the OnePulse solution, you can either re-access respondents from everyone who completed your initial survey, or re-target those who gave a specific answer to one of your questions.

5. Make your surveys engaging, but straightforward

Getting real time results quickly is not just about how many questions your survey includes, but how you write them.

We’ve written a blog on how to create online market research surveys that get respondents hooked which provides some fantastic engagement tips, and we would also recommend the following:

  • Keeping the language simple, unambiguous and easy to understand – this will enable your respondents to answer questions quickly, easily and accurately. Also avoid jargon as much as possible.
  • Making the respondent the focus of your questions to tap into their self-efficacy and feelings of importance and value to your research.
  • Avoid leading and biased questions – this will ensure your results are truly actionable.

Gathering agile customer insights – and fast – is easier than ever before with the right tools and know-how under your belt.

Here at OnePulse, we’re proud to say that we can offer both with our dynamic and innovative opinion platform!

In short, our years of expertise in market and insights research have enabled us to create a versatile agile customer insights tool that has enabled world-renowned brands like Coca-Cola and TikTok gain valuable insights from their perfect consumer audience at scale.

If you’d like to discover more of our expertise, be sure to download Your definitive guide to DIY surveys for better, faster insights, or book an intro with our team.

Alternatively, you register with us to start pulsing right away!

Why wait to hear what your customer is thinking?