Research Techniques

 
After helping you clarify your objectives and consider constraints such as time and budget, we will likely employ one or a combination of the following techniques to ensure that your data is collected in the optimal way.

Qualitative

  • Explore the many potential thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your target audience
  • Generate hypotheses to test
  • Typically appropriate at the beginning of a project
  • Particularly useful when little or no research has been done recently
  • Informs quantitative research
  • Respondents sourced from your internal customer base, internal prospect list, or an external panel
  • Techniques:
    • In-depth interview – Guided, open-ended discussion with a single participant
      • Typically conducted by telephone or web conference and lasts 30-60 minutes
      • Allows for the collection of a great amount of detail from participant
      • More appropriate when the target audience is relatively small and geographically disperse, making it well-suited to B2B research
      • Easy to modify questions if necessary after just a few interviews
    • Focus group – Moderated discussion with a group of participants
      • Can be conducted in-person or online
      • Useful in creating an open interchange of ideas
      • Online is more cost effective and more appropriate for younger participants who are more comfortable communicating this way
      • Less suitable when covering potentially sensitive information and requires more of a time commitment from the participant than one-on-one interviews, making it less appropriate for B2B research

Quantitative

  • Gather numeric data and conduct statistical analysis on larger samples of your target audience
  • Typically appropriate after qualitative research has made all the possible attitudes and behaviors better understood
  • Measure, test, and validate findings from qualitative research
  • Can incorporate open-ended questions that can then be quantified by grouping or coding responses into categories
  • Respondents sourced from your internal customer base, internal prospect list, or an external panel
  • Techniques:
    • Online survey – Questionnaire administered online
      • Respondents typically emailed a link to a structured, self-administered survey
      • Can be administered on desktop or mobile device
      • Enables presentation of and interaction with visual stimuli
      • Tends to be less expensive than other quantitative techniques
      • Tends to have lower response rates than other quantitative techniques, making it less appropriate for reaching some smaller B2B target audiences
    • Telephone survey – Questionnaire administered by trained interviewers over telephone
      • Interviewer can track down the right person to speak to, clarify question for respondent, and ask follow-up, probing questions to clarify or get more depth on responses
      • Higher response rates make this an advantageous way to reach smaller B2B target audiences
      • Tends to be more expensive than online surveys
    • Web intercept survey – Questionnaire administered online to your website visitors at the time of their visit
      • Useful for conducting website experience surveys in order to catch people immediately after their experience
      • Can also be an alternative method of reaching your target prospects
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