A Quick Guide to Understanding Qualitative Research

To survive in this data-driven world, businesses must invest in qualitative research to power their campaigns. Having access to timely and accurate information improves the quality of decision-making. Depending on data instead of experiential insights helps companies tap the right market in the right way. However, combining the two of them will propel companies towards success.

Qualitative Research can help you: –

1. Recognize customer behaviour patterns
2. Generate content that targets the demographic well
3. Save money
4. Provide industry-specific insights
5. Allow creativity to be a driving factor
6. Incorporate the human experience in fact-based strategy making
7. Collect detail-oriented data

What is qualitative research?

Qualitative research, a market research tool, collects valuable customer insights through open dialog and conversational communication. Instead of simply focusing on ‘what’ people buy, this method also deep dives into ‘why’ people prefer certain products over the others. This approach helps businesses see their services through the eyes of their potential customers to understand how to cater to them effectively. Your business can collect information through random sampling to pinpoint specific areas of concern. Working on these areas helps businesses expand their customer base and improve revenue levels.

How can qualitative research be carried out?

Companies should conduct qualitative research in a way that reveals customer behaviour and their perception of certain topics. Here are a few ways you can go through with your qualitative research:

One-on-one interviews

You could conduct detailed interviews with your customers to ease them into talking frankly. Talented interviewers have the potential to ask the right questions to find out customer buying patterns and their shopping motivation. Asking follow-up questions to gain more clarity is also an admirable technique. You can use phone calls or face-to-face interviews to extract the most accurate information from your respondents.

Focus Groups

Conducting a small interview with a focus group of a maximum of 10 respondents helps businesses gain collective data and save time. Your main objective should be to ask the what, why, and how questions in a way that promotes honest replies. Using surveys and group conversations help businesses gain insights, beta-test new products and examine new product ideas.

Ethnographic Research

This in-depth observational method observes people in their natural environment to determine their needs and perceptions. In this method, your researchers adopt your target audiences’ ambience and geographical constraints in order to walk in their shoes. Embodying your customers’ lifestyle helps you come up with products that’ll solve problems. Your team can spend from a few days to a few years to gather this highly valuable insight. Though it may take longer, expert researchers can find insights that are not apparent and yet highly influential.

How to collect and analyse qualitative research data?

Qualitative data collection methodology uses non-numeric and detailed information to examine how customers make decisions. To get valuable insights from your qualitative research tactics, your data should be wholesome, rich, and nuanced, a result of meticulous analysis. Here’s how you collect qualitative data effectively: –

1. No matter what process a researcher chooses, they need to know how to manage loads of data effectively. Several tactics such as recording audios or videos and taking notes can assist the data analysis processes.
2. Your experienced researcher will take approximately 8 to 10 hours to transcribe those recordings to produce a 20 to 30-page written copy (questionpro). They can also segregate their data based on different focus groups to bring out the reasons for their diverse thought.
3. If your researcher chooses to take field notes, maintaining comments, contextual information, and non-verbal cues are extremely helpful. These nuances help key decision-makers read between the lines and understand the customer at a deeper level. Then, you can create products that really cater to your customers’ needs and get ahead of your competition.

Conclusion

 

We believe that businesses undermine the power of qualitative research a lot. To understand your customer deeper and connect to them without seeing them as a statistic, you need to give due importance to qualitative research. We’re sure this valuable practice will help you uncover several nuances in customer perspectives.