There are many good reasons for companies to engage nationwide market research firms to develop qualitative market research studies. Perhaps your company is wanting to figure out why your customers aren’t very forthcoming in providing feedback, or maybe you want to measure if a recent product launch was successful, or you may be wondering why your website isn’t engaging users the way you expected it to. These three examples can all be explored by conducting a qualitative market research study.
A qualitative study can shed light on these questions, and more! Such studies are great at getting to the heart of what drives consumers’ behaviors and their motivations and decision-making processes.
The heart of any qualitative or quantitative market research study is your participants. Recruiting the right participants for you study is a key component to the overall success of the study. Below are three tips to ensure the best candidates are recruited.
Tip #1 — Start early
The moment your study is greenlighted, it’s time to start thinking about recruitment. Before you can begin outreach efforts to find participants, you first need a comprehensive understanding of the study’s objectives so you can target the right categories of participants. Market research consultants understand that thinking about recruitment at the earliest stages of designing a market study will prevent the study from missing its deadlines. Focus Insite has been called in to ‘rescue’ many studies because recruitment wasn’t started early enough and the clients didn’t anticipate how challenging it would be to find and successfully recruit participants.
Tip #2 — Create a Specific Screening Guide
We’ll let you in on a recruiting secret: screening guides. These are the most valuable tools for weeding out respondents who do and don’t qualify to be included in a study. A well-thought out screening guide includes demographics, geography, user experience, and other details that the market researcher wants to capture. Depending on the objective of the study, and the industry its targeting, will influence the types of participants you’ll be recruiting. Whether you’re designing a medical study, a B2B study, or general consumer study, screening guides are essential tools for recruitment.
Tip #3 — Recruit Backups
If you plan on including 20 people to participate in a focus group or in-depth interview, you’ll want to have a few extra participants recruited for backup. It’s rare for any qualitative or quantitative study to not have participants drop out last minute, or it’s discovered that they didn’t answer the screening questions accurately or honestly, and don’t actually qualify to participate. Managing no-shows, and dealing with last-minute substitutions, while nerve wracking, can be made less stressful by having some back-up participants on call.
Incorporating the above three tips into your recruitment effort will get your market study started on the right foot.
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