Are You Designing Your Surveys With The Right Intentions?

Because online surveys are so inexpensive to distribute, a lot of business owners use them whenever they need to uncover information about their target markets. At first, this seems reasonable. Surveying your audience with an online questionnaire offers cheap distribution and rapid collection of data. You can gather important market insight in a few days that once required months to collect. However, are you moving forward with the right purpose?

Often, a survey may represent a less than ideal research method. Much depends on the type of information you hope to collect. In some cases, one-on-one open-ended interviews might be more appropriate. In other cases, focus groups might be better-suited to your objective.

In this article, we'll help you decide whether an online questionnaire poses a suitable solution for your market research requirements. To this end, we'll discuss the needs of your internal stakeholders as well as how to sharpen your research goals. You'll often find it valuable to boil things down to a single overriding question. We'll explain how below.

Depending on the size of your company, and the frequency with which you conduct surveys, it may be difficult to focus on a single target. If your organization is comprised of multiple departments, each with a justifiable need for market research, they may want to contribute questions. This does more than merely dilute the goal of your survey; it increases its length, and widens its scope. The result is that your questionnaire will lack focus, and be too long. Fewer respondents will complete it.

The first step is to narrow the scope of your questionnaire. Meet with each department's manager to discuss the research items they're interested in. Do they need to uncover a key piece of information in order to move forward on a project? Do they have access to the information via other methods?

When you have a clearer grasp of the needs of each department head, you'll be better able to determine whether a survey is the right approach. For example, suppose a product manager wants to know how customers perceive a particular feature on an existing product. A focus group may be more appropriate.

You might also notice that multiple managers are conducting surveys to gather similar information. Rather than dilute the goal of your project, suggest they combine theirs.

In addition to a healthy response rate, the success of your questionnaire depends largely on asking for the right type of information. For example, suppose your survey project's stated objective is to "understand how customers perceive our company." It sounds simple, but is actually a difficult goal to fulfill. It's too broad. You can use multiple choice, Likert scales, matrix questions, and open-ended questions, but all of these may fail to deliver the insight you're targeting.

Focus groups and individual interviews might be more suitable for attracting responses that are largely qualitative. Otherwise, refine your objective.

Every stakeholder involved in your project will start with multiple research items they want addressed. This is normal. But it also blunts the goal of your survey. Encourage stakeholders to identify one question that either encapsulates all of their needs, or deserves a higher priority than others. Doing so further refines your focus. It allows you to hone in on high-priority information as your objective becomes sharper.

For example, instead of "which product should we develop?," the objective becomes "which four projects should we pursue - given our constraints - to increase our revenue by 7% this year?" Your survey items can then be designed with this particular target in mind.

Online surveys represent an invaluable market research tool. With them, you can generate quick responses from your audience, providing key insight into their wants, needs, and perceptions. But to maximize the usefulness of the data you collect, make sure you start your projects with a clearly-defined, narrow goal leading the way.