The research approach: The importance of data to drive our best communications.

There is a trend in Public Relations: we should know our customer. Hence, we count with a powerful and low-cost tool in market research. Online surveys are one of the most potent and popular tools we use to uncover interesting insights. These surveys have multiple stunning applications such as generating mentions and interesting stories in quality industry and top-tier publications or addressing the company towards the most successful version of its brand messaging.

Online marketing is still here, and we want to share a couple of reasons why the aforementioned surveys have been in force for so long. And, will continue to be a popular tool in market research:

  1. Global Reach – one of the best aspects of an online survey is that anyone with access to a smart phone, tablet or computer can participate
  2. Speed & Cost – online surveys are usually the fastest type of survey research compared to phone, mail or in-person interviews which take longer and can be costly.
  3. Less Bias – since the survey is standardized across participants, there is no chance for questions to be posed with a different intonation or phrasing. What can happen over the phone or in-person surveys.
  4. Visual / Auditory Capabilities – online surveys can easily integrate images, links, sound or video which can be used to educate participants on a certain topic or term or to get feedback on different materials, such as reactions to a brand advertisement.

Thinking about you

There are a big variety of survey questions that we use when drawing up a questionnaire.

One of these are closed-ended questions, which give participants a certain number of options to pick from in single-select, multi-select or rank and sort formats. But we can also employ open-ended questions, which are a great tool to use along with closed-ended questions to gain a better understanding of participants’ thoughts or feelings about a specific topic.

For example, we may give a participant a list of new technologies and ask them to pick which one has been the most transformative to their industry in the last year. This is an example of a closed-ended question. Next, we may follow up that question by asking, “Why did you choose this technology?”. This is an open-ended question that can be replied with an a-text answer where they can type whatever they fancy the most important or influential factors in their selection are.

Online surveys are an important tool in research that can be used across industries and applications. Whether you’re looking for new insights to apply in your brand strategy, testing different messages, or aiming at getting more media coverage around trending topics. Research shouldn’t be forgotten as a powerful and effective tool in the toolbox. Almost every methodology around products and services speak about the importance of having inbound information to define overall strategy and also specific tactics.

In MARKETCROSS we dream of always having market information to deploy our PR activities. At times you can. Others you cannot. But we always try to understand our market, because, at the end of the day, we are working for our clients.