This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s post where we covered the first step in the five-step marketing research process. If you haven’t already read through that post, make sure you do before continuing.
Once you’ve identified the research question at hand, it’s time to move on to the next step in the process: designing your study.
It’s important to be strategic when building your study. Taking this approach when designing the study will make sure you gather the data that you will need to answer the research question you worked so hard to identify. Tackling this next step with this mindset will ensure you don’t end up with data that’s not useful.
You can develop a strong study by keeping the following sentence in mind:
Conduct a(n) ____________ among __________ to learn about __________ as measured by __________.
Filling in this sentence will help guide your study design and ensure it’s focused on answering the question you previously identified.
For our example this week, we’ll work with our client, X University, who is interested in introducing a new master’s program if it will help them retain a larger portion of their undergraduate constituency as they go into graduate school.
The first blank is your research tool. Will you conduct a survey, focus group or interviews? For our purposes, we’ll proceed with a survey for ease of dissemination and its ability to collect a high number of responses.
Once you’ve decided on a survey tool, your next blank is your research audience. Our client is interested to learn how likely they are to retain their undergraduate constituents if they introduce a new master’s program. With this information, we can narrow our audience down to X University undergraduate seniors.
Your next blank will be the main idea of the research. We know we’re looking to gauge X University’s undergraduate seniors’ likeliness to return to X University through this new graduate program, so this is our next bit of information.
The final piece to this word puzzle is the type of questions you will ask. It can be difficult to solicit engagement from students if there is no incentive tied to your study and people are more likely to participate if the study is easy to complete. We can gauge likelihood on a scale from one to five where one is extremely likely, and one is not likely at all.
Here’s our final statement: Conduct a survey among X University’s undergraduate seniors to learn about their likeliness to re-enroll at X University for graduate school if a new master’s program is introduced as measured by a scale of one to five, where one is extremely likely, and one is not likely at all.
Going through this exercise will help make sure you don’t solicit information you don’t need. People value their time. If you’re lucky enough to gain their feedback, it’s important we make sure we’re asking questions that will help us uncover meaningful insights.
I look forward to learning about ways you, as marketers in higher education, have applied this principle in different scenarios. Let me know your experience in the comments and don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter before you go!