One of the best ways to conduct market research (without dropping thousands on an agency) is to get direct input from your target audience. For example, you can do this with a traditional survey or a more compelling quiz-like experience.
You can’t just churn out some random questions and expect to get high-quality data, though. From confusing your participants with unclear wording to influencing their answers, you’d end up skewing your results.
So, it doesn’t matter if you’re conducting market research to understand your customers’ problems, validate a new product idea, refine your messaging, publish a report, or something else entirely: you should always start with strategic questions.
Here’s why it makes all the difference, what you need to focus on, and what pitfalls you must avoid to set yourself up for success.
And guess what? ScoreApp, our quiz and market research tool, makes all this a breeze.
Why your market research results depend on your questions
Ineffective questions are one of the most common market research mistakes: you’d either fail to get the answers you need or only obtain low-quality data. Do you really want to base your decisions on that?
If, instead, you’re only interested in successful market research, you need:
- Survey questions that feed into your goals – Why exactly are you conducting your market research? What are you hoping to achieve? And to get there, what do you need to find out? When you’re clear on this, you can work your way backwards to plan your questions. Every single one should be there for a reason
- To craft them in the most effective way – Your market research questions must keep your participants engaged until the end while also avoiding misunderstandings and bias (we’ll share some tips soon!)
ScoreApp offers you a library of customizable templates and handy features (like our AI assistant) so you can create the right questions for your market research, helping you:
- Maximize clarity, avoiding dangerous misunderstandings that’d compromise your results or cause your participants to give up
- Minimize bias (for example, if you ask “How much do you enjoy X on a scale of 1 to 10?”, you’re already implying that someone is enjoying it!)
- Reflect your target audience’s mindset and motivations, without going off track or confusing them with jargon
- Get deeper and more thoughtful responses from your participants
How quiz format and tone improve the quality of your market research responses
The structure, tone, and overall flow of your market research will shape your participants’ experience, determining whether or not they complete it.
Unfortunately, many businesses send out robotic, clunky, or irrelevant surveys (the kinds that either put their audience to sleep or feel like a third-degree interrogation).
Instead, to compel more participants to stick around until the end and only share thoughtful answers, you must make things easier for them.
That’s why ScoreApp is designed to:
- Keep your participants engaged and build trust with interactive, polished, and on-brand layouts (no dull and impersonal surveys, thank you very much!)
- Keep things varied through a mixture of question types, from yes/no to multiple choice and sliding scales (and more), which will also allow you to collect both qualitative and quantitative data for your research
- Prioritize an engaging tone so that your market research questions flow like a 1:1 conversation with each participant
- Deliver personalized experiences that always feel relevant to that person thanks to logic jumps and conditional questions (for example, if someone has already said that they haven’t got a business website, they won’t see any of your questions asking them whether or not they’re getting leads from it)
With ScoreApp, you can also choose to conduct your market research through a user-friendly, visually attractive survey or a quiz-like experience. The latter tends to be particularly effective because it compels even more people to participate, offering them something valuable: an element of self-discovery and personalized results.
For example, a fitness coach might want to plan a market research quiz to gain a better understanding of their target customers, and to reach as many of the right people as possible, they could lead with: “Share your current health and fitness experience to help me create the right offer for you, and discover your score, with tips on how to improve it.”
The hidden cost of poorly worded questions for your market research
When you’re basing your strategy, research, or decisions on your new data, collecting wrong or low-quality insights is an expensive mistake.
The ultimate price will depend on your goals, but for example, the wrong survey questions can lead to:
- Misreading your target market and creating a product or service they don’t actually want or need
- Planning a whole marketing strategy that doesn’t resonate with them
- Spending time and money targeting the wrong segments altogether
- Creating and publishing a market intelligence report based on skewed data, compromising your credibility
So, while you might be tempted to write down the first questions that come to mind and just go with those, remember: it could cost you a lot more time (and money) later down the line.
That’s why ScoreApp guides you through every step of your question creation and design, so you can avoid common pitfalls and only share strategic and effective market research surveys with your audience.
Turn your market research questions into customer insights you can actually use
We doubt you’re collecting data as a hobby. You’re planning on doing something with it, right?
Ironically, many businesses end up gathering lots of data (whoop, whoop!) but, because they don’t know how to analyze it, they either stay stuck or don’t make the most of it (ouch).
This is a common risk when you carry out your research in a messy way, ask poorly crafted questions, or choose a market intelligence tool with inadequate reporting features.
On the contrary, when you plan and conduct your research strategically and are crystal clear on how to analyze your results? Your new data becomes a goldmine for your business!
Luckily, with ScoreApp, it’s easy to:
- Make sense of your new data, which you’ll find in your dashboard
- Go through all your submissions, spot overarching patterns, and identify gaps
- Make informed decisions based on your new data, whether that’s tailoring your marketing for different segments, only creating offers your audience actually wants, working out your unique angle when using your insights for an original research report, and so on
Get stronger and clearer market research results by asking smarter questions with ScoreApp
You don’t need a background in data collection to conduct your market research successfully, but you do need the right plan and tool.
Now you know exactly what to focus on and what to avoid to gather high-quality data through your questions. So, let’s get started!
With ScoreApp, you get to make the most of:
- Templates and features to craft effective market research questions, collecting all the right qualitative and quantitative data (without bias or misunderstandings)
- User-friendly layouts and options to keep your participants engaged while offering them an attractive, personalized experience
- A clear dashboard and reporting features to easily go through your new insights, using them to smash your market research goals and make informed decisions
Create your market research survey or quiz with ScoreApp today and for FREE.
