Your customers are the heart of your company and the key to its success. Therefore, gathering  information about their needs and preferences is imperative. Conducting market research allows you to get to know your customer better, creates more definition in your audience, and can even help you make key marketing and branding decisions for your company. In a nutshell, research helps you uncover “what’s working” and “what’s not.” 

Even with all its benefits, the idea of market research can bring beads of sweat to the foreheads of company executives and marketing leaders. Visions of expensive focus groups, exhaustive quantitative surveys, and lengthy market analyses from high-level consulting firms can make you want to ignore the whole thing altogether, or say…”maybe next year.” But consumer research doesn’t have to be a sharp uphill battle to implement. Below are 4 easy ways to build better insights. 

1.NPS Score

If you don’t measure NPS, start today. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score and is designed to establish a baseline measurement of your customers’ loyalty to your company, as well as their satisfaction with your products or services. By asking only one simple 0-10 rating question, “how likely are you to recommend this product/service,” you can easily identify loyalists, detractors, and others who fall somewhere in-between.

NPS can be easily calculated by subtracting the percentage of “detractors” (ratings of 0-6) from the percentage of “promoters” (ratings of 9-10). Although your “passives” (ratings of 7-8), should not be included in your NPS score, they can be a valuable segment for further evaluation. This easy calculator tool from Delighted can help you get started.

NPS score can be implemented in two ways: through an in-app survey, or from an email survey. Both have its pros and cons, but the key is to stick with one method and to engage the survey at the same point every time in the customer journey. 

DID YOU KNOW: Although your promoters offer the immediate opportunity to build your brand ambassador network, drive upsell opportunities, and implement referral programs, your passive segment can be the most valuable resource. This group provides insights on what feature, service, or product improvements can drive future growth.  

For the more adventurous, follow up an NPS survey with more specific, tailored questions to each of the three segments outlined above. Find ways to reward your “promoters” to retain their loyalty and keep them in the fold. 

2. Social Media Monitoring

You may spend an exhaustive amount of time promoting your company, products, and services through social media, but how closely are you monitoring these social media accounts and your interactions with customers? While it’s recommended that companies engage in robust social listening, we recommend employing the age-old adage of walking before you run, by enabling social monitoring first. 

What is social monitoring? To start, it can be as simple as “keeping an eye” on online mentions, comments, reviews and product questions, and responding to engagement timely. You can start this process with just an extra 10-15 minutes a day. 

PRO TIP: To make the process of monitoring easier, consider centralizing all social media profiles into one platform that can enable message monitoring at scale and create alerts for immediate action.

For those already walking and ready for a jog, think about implementing a more robust social listening tool. While social monitoring helps you stay in touch with customers in the day-to-day, social listening helps give wider visibility into understanding your audience on a broader level, by providing access to all conversation around your brand, industry, and competition. Some tools offering varying degrees of social management, monitoring, and listening features include: Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, BuzzSumo, Talkwalker, mention, Sprinklr. 

Need support in selecting the right system for you? We can help. 

3. Website User Feedback

Your website can be a valuable tool for understanding existing and potential customers. And what better way than to sit back, relax, and let a customer experience tool do the heavy lifting. Implementing a tool like HotJar, Mouseflow or CrazyEgg can help you collect user feedback across the customer journey and monitor key interaction points for friction during the consideration and purchase phases. These behavioral analysis tools offer functionality like website session recordings, event tracking, heatmaps, funnel analysis, surveys, and website feedback forms that allow you  to learn in the moment how website users are navigating your site. 

Implementing a user experience tool can be a valuable resource for product managers, marketing teams, and web/UX designers. These tools can go further than basic analytics to dig into design, functionality, usability, readability, and ease-of-use on your most valuable asset, your website. 

PRO TIP: Many of these experience tools are easy for even the non-developer to implement and offer bundled functionality such as live chat, pop-up surveys, feedback widgets, and even NPS score integrations.
Social Media Polls

4. Social Media Polls

There’s no better way to get the opinion of others than in a place where your audience is already hanging out. Social media polls are simple to create, quick to implement, and can provide feedback and insight into business questions and behavioral preferences for implementing features, services, or new products. Polling can be done on almost any social platform, but is most common through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

DID YOU KNOW: Polls can actually increase engagement on top of providing valuable insights. If well-designed, they can be visually and aesthetically pleasing, draw your audience in, and require minimal effort from the consumer. How’s that for a cherry on top of a simple survey sundae?

If you need help getting started, consider asking customers to choose between two things in a scenario such as: “would you rather” or “this or that.” This can also be expanded into a selection of preference out of three items. The key is to make the questions fun, relatable, and easy to digest.

Conclusion

Whether you’re looking to refine your products and services, gain advantage over competitors, increase customer loyalty and retention, or just improve the overall customer experience, consumer research is a necessary first step. In its simplest form, it just means talking and communicating with your customers regularly. If this process still seems daunting, we can collaborate with you to develop a market research or consumer research approach that suits you best. Contact us to get started.