Recruiting participants for qualitative market research is no easy task. If your organization has never embarked on this before, it may make a lot of sense to reach out for some advice or a quote for the job from a qualitative recruiting company. There are several factors your organization will need to excel at in order to make the recruitment project successfully.
In this post, I discuss 5 tips to assist with your qualitative market research recruiting. They are aimed to make the process effective and efficient. They touch on online pre-screening, social media and panel usage, follow-up phone calls, and reminders.
All of which are necessary in order to recruit well.
Thinking about recruiting for an upcoming qualitative market research project? Here are 5 tips.
Tip 1: Pre-screen online
Screening participants online through a survey saves a qualitative recruitment company a ton of time and effort. If you have an email list of hundreds or thousands of contacts, it is easy to click one button and contact them all with a survey. Much faster than dialing each individually and running them through the same questions.
With a pre-screener survey online, qualified participants are placed in your lap. It makes the recruitment process work much faster and efficiently. We always recommend starting with online or email surveys as a first step to market research recruiting.
Tip 2: Build a panel
Tying in with the first point, whether you are a qualitative recruiting company or just an organization looking to sign-up participants for your own market research, having an opt-in panel list is key. This is a database of users who have raised their hand and said "Yes, I will participate when you have a need."
No other list will provide you more success and more return. Think about building awareness and sign-ups for your panel everywhere: your website, social media, events, outings, flyers, referrals, etc. It will pay large dividends.
Tip 3: Use social media
Outside of panel or a vetted email list, social media is another excellent tool to use for market research pre-screening and outreach. The idea is to get as many people coming to your for your qualitative project as possible. Consider using paid advertisements on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. We have seen the most success with Facebook.
Our digital marketing experts at Drive Research target users by key interest buckets and consumer behaviors using paid Facebook advertisements. The ads can also be targeted to several types of geographies: designated market areas (DMAs), radius around stores, and ZIP Codes. The platform offers a lot of flexibility for recruitment.
Need some advice or assistance using social media for market research? See our contact information below.
Tip 4: Follow-up with personal phone calls
Think pre-screening, qualifying, and potentially signing up participants online is enough? It is not. In order to successfully recruit participants, your organization or a hired partner needs to place follow-up phone calls to participants. Why? Several reasons.
First, it gives the recruitment team the ability to rescreen participants. It is always important to verbally confirm the responses or ask new ones which are more critical to avoid poor quality data or participants from the online survey.
Second, it gives the qualitative recruiter a chance to build a relationship and rapport with the participant so they know the market research is legit. This rapport pays huge dividends and strongly increases the likelihood of the participants following through and showing up at the intended date and time. The best recruiters build a relationship with the participant where the participant feels they are letting the person down if they do not show.
Tip 5: Continue with reminders and confirmations
Finally, a lot of work needs to go into the final steps of the recruitment process. This involves items like confirmation emails, calendar invitations, reminder telephone calls, and reminder texts. All are necessary to boost show rates for your interviews, focus groups, or other forms of qualitative market research.
Contact our Qualitative Recruiting Company
Drive Research is a market research firm located in Upstate New York. Our qualitative recruiting services span across the country as our team has the ability to target, recruit, and confirm participants for market research anywhere in the U.S.
Interested in learning more about our market research services?
Contact us below:
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Email us at [email protected]
Call us at 888-725-DATA
Text us at 315-303-2040