Today’s consumers are internet savvy and do serious research on products and services before making the purchase decision. That’s why businesses invest in market research before launching a new product or service. The common methods of conducting market research are surveys, customer observations, focus groups, and interviews. Interviews are a form of primary research and aim to collect more comprehensive information. They are considered an ideal option to learn about consumers’ behavior, needs and opinions. However, the usefulness of market research interviews depends on how they are designed, set up and conducted. Interview transcription services can help capture all the information, making it easier to obtain valuable insights to prepare market research reports.
Let’s look the goals of market research interviews and how you can improve them.
Goals of Market Research Interviews
Market research involves learning about your industry, target audience and competitors to get an understanding of customer reactions and what they want. Market research interviews help businesses assess:
- the feasibility of a business or product idea
- whether you can expand into a new market segment or geographical area
- effect of industry or economic influences
- changing customer needs and perceptions
Interviews also help you evaluate new products in the market and why a competitor is gaining ground. Interviews are also useful as follow-up to surveys to further understand respondents’ answers.
The findings of market research interviews can be used to start a new business, measure the success of marketing strategies, and create or revamp marketing plans.
Best Practices to Improve Market Research Interviews
Market research interviews involve asking the right people the right questions, in the right way. Both in-person and virtual interviews allow you understand respondents’ behavior, attributes, preferences, feelings, knowledge and opinions. This information can be used to restructure your entire marketing strategy. Here are five effective strategies to improve market research interviews:
- Have a clear idea about who you want to interview and what you want to know about them: Consider who you will interview and the type of information you want to collect. For instance, to develop focused brand positioning, businesses would need to create a customer profile that identifies the age of their target audience, gender, marital status, family, occupation, where they live, educational qualifications, and social media they are active on. By focusing on the right target market, you can see better and faster results.
- Focus on understanding what your customers want: Interviews questions should be designed to clearly understand what your customers really want. Make sure to identify needs that are not being met and how audience’s needs may have changed over time.
- Do thorough brand research: This would involve asking questions to understand overall brand awareness in the marketplace, how your audience currently perceives your brand and compares to competing brands, and what they think about the brand’s ads, website, social media interactions, and so on.
- Communicate clearly: To get those valuable insights, you need to communicate clearly and make sure respondents understand the questions. Keep questions short and simple. Make sure you cover all of the key questions and make good use of your time. Conversation should flow naturally. Avoid questions that lead the respondents to a specific answer. To get valuable insights, always ask open-ended questions when doing market research. This will allow people to reply in their own words. Try incentivizing them to drive maximum participation. Be transparent and honest about how your business will use the information collected.
- Ensure continuous data collection and analyses: After collecting the data, analyze it to identify trends and changes that have the potential to impact your business. In fact, ongoing data collection and analyses is important at every stage. For example, even if you did your research before launching a product, you need to conduct follow-up interviews after the launch to get customer feedback and market data. Make sure to analyze the results thoroughly as it can help with your future marketing strategy.
Before you start out, develop an interview guide. Design your questions to obtain answers that can help you achieve your research goals. Market research, like brands and products, should have a value proposition. Explain to people why they should participate and respond. Make sure your questions are clear and easy to understand. Record your interviews and get them transcribed. You can do this yourself, but to save time and ensure for quality results, consider outsourcing the task.
Why Outsource Market Research Transcription
When conducted in a proper way, market research can provide a lot of valuable data that can be analyzed. Recording interviews and getting them transcribed by an online transcription company is a practical way to get the information documented quickly and accurately.
- Professional transcriptionists will make sure that all of the key conversation is captured
- They can deliver verbatim transcripts with up to 99% accuracy along with timecodes
- Even if you do the transcription on your own using speech recognition technology these professionals , can review your text documents for accuracy
- Saves time for focus on market research and other core tasks
- Can deliver content in different formats suitable for analytics
- Transcription at affordable rates
Outsourcing interview transcription to a reliable business transcription service provider will ensure accurate content that can be used to create quality written reports about demographics, trends and prospects.
