Your marketing efforts (and ergo your product sales) can only be as good as you know your target audience, and that’s something almost every marketer will agree upon. Conducting online market research is crucial in understanding and reaching your audience effectively.
Read How to Do Market Research With a Media Monitoring Tool?
After all, what impact can a marketing campaign have if it’s not aligned with your customer’s needs and pain points?
On that note, we’re here with a conclusive guide that covers all the best practices and strategies you’ll need to consider when conducting market research online.
Let’s get started!
Best practices for conducting online market research
Follow these simple (yet effective) strategies for perfecting your online market research.
1. Define your objective for the research
Before you even begin to dive into the task of doing any kind of research, decide on the research objective.
For example, do you wish to understand your audience’s pain points to improve your marketing copy?
Read Emerging Market Research Trends You Can’t Miss
Or do you want to get insights into something as cavalier as their payment methods so you can add those payment options to your app?
2. Identify your target audience
The indicator of any good research is how well you define your target audience and the subsequent representative sample size.
For example, if you work in the insurance industry and were to ask the public about the benefits they’d like to see from their insurance provider, you’d get a varied list of answers.
However, if you were to create subsets of your audience to understand which benefits each segment of your audience requires, you’d get more actionable insights (e.g., the healthcare requirements of a college-going adult and an older adult in retirement would be different).
Incorporating audience segmentation techniques can help you identify and target specific groups more effectively. This segmentation allows for tailored marketing strategies that resonate better with each unique audience subset.
Other things to consider are sample size (e.g., 10% of a population), margin of error (e.g., 5%), confidence level (e.g., 95%), and variability (e.g., 0.5) to guarantee accurate results.
3. Decide on which research methods to use
The research method you decide on can be detrimental to gaining the valuable insights you need (and can even change the way you approach the sample sizes of your studies and the kind of questions you ask).
The most common research methods are qualitative and quantitative, but you can even go one step further and use any of these research methods:
- Mixed-method research
- Experimental research
- Longitudinal research
- Case study research
- Delphi research
We’d also suggest pre-testing your research methods and strategies to make sure your audience can properly use the tools available to them.
4. Leave no room for biases
Experts recommend having your questionnaire and research sample reviewed by peers to remove any subconscious bias. On that note, they even recommend choosing a random sampling method to find your research audience.
Here are a few more ways you can avoid any bias in your research and improve your chances that your results are accurate:
- Try to inform all your audiences about the impact of this study and provide them with all the necessary information needed so there’s a standardized process and more transparency in your research.
- Keep the wording in your questions neutral (e.g., a question such as “How do you like our service?” could potentially make the audience think they like your service instead of giving an honest answer).
- If you’re using an MCA style of questioning, include a balanced option for answers where users can appropriately provide their opinions. Also, include an “other” option.
- Don’t ask double-barrel questions. Instead, ask a single question and provide readers with all the context they need to answer it accurately.
- Use appropriate wording to avoid misrepresentation. Consider cultural aspects to protect sensitivity and respect the opinions and feelings of all your respondents.
5. Keep researching and improving
Last but not least, as times change and customers adapt, your audience is bound to think differently of you as a brand and of your industry. So, keep researching to ensure you have the most recent audience insights to apply in your business.
Strategies to consider when conducting online market research
Onto the meatier bits, let’s discuss how to get the job of market research done — and that too online!
1. Leverage social listening tools
In today’s day and age, there couldn’t be a better friend for marketers than social listening tools. These tools keep a pulse on all the online conversations surrounding your brand, customers, competitors, industry, and niche.
Read How to Use Social Listening For Market Research
Some social listening tools even go one step further and send you notifications anytime your brand is mentioned online, allowing you to interact with users and diffuse the situation.
In this context, however, social listening tools will allow you to better understand audience sentiments surrounding your products/services and help you improve on the same.
2. Conduct keyword research
There’s a lot that brands can learn about an audience simply through keyword research.
For example, you could learn more about common customer dissatisfaction surrounding your product through keyword research (e.g., a query like “how to fix XYZ on your app” provides much-needed context).
In other instances, keyword research can help you learn more about your audience, demographics, industry trends, customer behaviors, etc.
Some keyword research tools like Semrush will even provide insights into your audience’s socioeconomic status, influences, content viewing preferences, etc.
Read 5 Best Tools for Market Research
3. Join discussions happening online
By joining discussions happening online, we mean partaking in the online communities and social groups where your potential customers are. This will allow you to understand:
- How your audience communicates (e.g., do they use certain lingos, jargon, or stylistic approaches when communicating? If yes, you can use the same stylistic approaches in your marketing copies).
- Who are their top influences (e.g., they might often speak about an industry expert they might’ve learned from or a brand they admire — you might even get insights into other topics such as shows they view or the type of humor they enjoy)
- Understanding of the tech stack or tools they use (i.e., their tech intelligence), their sentiments surrounding your product or service, and insights into their pain points, wants, needs, etc.
4. Leverage feedback and market research surveys
Collecting feedback through interviews and online surveys is another common method of how brands understand audience sentiments.
For example, you’ll often see companies collecting feedback after brand interactions. On that note, you can even get in touch with your internal sales and support teams to get their insights into what your audience wants.
Experts suggest making your surveys and feedback extremely direct, only asking your audience relevant questions that don’t take up much of their time, and offering incentives for completing the survey.
5. Create your own micro-communities
Another thing you could do to collect valuable audience feedback in real time is to create your own micro-community.
Glossier is perhaps the most popular brand name to do this, but other brands/influencers, such as VYPER, Neil Patel, MyYogaPal, etc., have all created micro-communities for themselves.
In Glossier’s case, its micro-communities (which are filled with brand loyalists) have helped it gain feedback about upcoming product launches, understand customer demands, and build new products.
6. Use your CRM data
In the years of interacting with your customers, you’ve managed to create a pot of gold just for yourself—and that gold is your CRM data.
This data provides a complete overarching understanding of how your actual customers behave, how they interact with your product/service, what their journey maps look like — just how long their user sessions last, how they consume your content, etc.
All of this data can be further leveraged to improve your product/service and your customers’ user experience!
7. Get insights from industry reports
Instead of doing the heavy-lifting work yourself, you can instead rely on the analysis of industry reports and get the insights you need.
For example, many freely available reports have insights into how customers like to consume content, how their buying preferences have changed over the years, what kinds of shopping budgets they operate with, etc.
However, the insights from these reports might or might not be applicable to you and your business as they’re often looking at a general audience.
Many high-level resources (usually gated content) have niche-wide reporting on the insights you need.
8. Employ free tools like AlsoAsked
Last but not least, free resources like AlsoAsked and AnswerThePublic showcase your customers’ questions about your products/services, industry, and much more.
These questions can further be translated into insights you can use to your advantage.
Determ can help you with researching your target markets online
Now that we’ve provided you with all the tactical advice available allow us to guide you one step further and tell you how Determ can help you with online market research to improve your marketing strategies.
Our media monitoring tool acts like a social listening tool, keeping track of all online conversations surrounding your brand, customers, competitors, and more. This tool has helped companies manage crises, track market share, gain a deeper understanding of audience sentiments, and act on customer insights.
We can do the same for you, too! To access our full product knowledge and learn how we can impact your business, book a free demo and get a personalized Determ experience!
Author Bio Mike Bandar is an award-winning UK-based entrepreneur. A Founding Partner of Turn Partners, the startup studio focused on the acquisition, turnaround or creation of digital businesses. Through Turn Partners, Mike co-founded Hopper HQ the Instagram planning and scheduling tool, working with thousands of influencers, brands, and agencies around the world.
