While focus groups often reinforce assumptions, rapid testing is able to illustrate whether any assumptions about a product, audience, and go-to-market strategy are accurate.

It’s time to face the facts: focus groups aren’t cutting it anymore. These relics date back to 1937 when Princeton University researchers investigated what sort of messaging sent over radio airwaves would drum up the most support for the World War II effort. Focus groups might have been the most viable option at the time, but there’s no reason researchers should continue to spend $2.2 billion worldwide on the questionable insights offered by modern focus groups. Participants might provide a slew of opinions about a product, but that feedback doesn't predict whether people will actually buy it. With so many companies mistakenly placing trust in focus groups, it’s no wonder Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen reports that 95% of the 30,000 new products created…

Daunting, time-consuming and expensive. Or is it?

Doing any form of research doesn't always need to be so costly, here are five options to help you recruit participants for surveys.

I've also produced an article on how to get B2B survey responses, the focus of this post is helping you to find B2C participants for your research. We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any research is often something which is undervalued and that's finding respondents to take part. More importantly getting the right respondents for your research is even harder. Research is essential to help get insight into a variety of business functions. and luckily the word of market research is maturing which means that there are loads of tools available that can help you. I've put together a list below of some of the most reliable places to find respondents for B2C research including surveys, focus groups, depth interviews…

The pain of finding B2B survey and user research respondents is real. Here are 6 solutions including free and paid services.

Finding relevant survey respondents for market research projects can be hard and the cost can be eye watering too, particularly if you're in a specialist B2B niche or you need senior respondents. We all know that one of the hardest parts of doing any B2B research is often something which is undervalued- “getting respondents” and more importantly “getting the right respondents”. So you’re running a survey and it’s pretty niche, say you’re looking for B2B respondents purely for research rather than lead generation – where do you start? Where do you actually go for respondents? We’ve scoured the web and even given some of these a try, for our 6 ways to find B2B survey respondents.

Option 1: Google Consumer Surveys

It might be branded “consumer surveys” but they have lots of B2B publishers…

6 types of user experience and online audience surveying tools to help create a more customer-centred website and brand

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics are used by nearly every company since they provide valuable quantitative data on site visitor behaviour. No surprise there. But web analytics systems don't give direct qualitative feedback from site visitors and customers and the surprise to me, is that relatively few companies use these, although their popularity is increasing rapidly. They can be used to support UX improvement projects both on the live site and when getting structured feedback during website redesign. We believe that qualitative website feedback tools are also essential to take the pulse of your website and improve your UX, but surprisingly they are less widely used despite paid services such as Opinion Labs being available for many years and some incredible free tools.

April 2018 update to tools

Thanks for your suggestions in previous…

The 5 best tools for collecting and showcasing customer reviews

Reviews have become essential to buying and selling online with customers trusting customer reviews over 10 times more than descriptions or claims made by the brand itself. Reviews can also benefit a brands’ search marketing efforts, as often they will feature highly in SERPS, particularly for local results. They enable marketers to collect and request product and customer service reviews. Some tools also curate conversations happening on social media for brands to use as social proof on their websites. Customer review and ratings tools enable marketers to collect and request product and customer service reviews. Some tools also curate conversations happening on social media for brands to use as social proof on their websites. We've researched five of the best customer review and ratings tools so you can decide which is best for your business. These tools have been selected to be particularly useful…

Our interview with Brent Coker, creator of Webreep

I love finding out about new tools to help improve marketing, particularly when they help understand customer feedback and drive change. It's one of the reasons I got into web analytics and it's our main focus at SmartInsights.com. Of course, most web analytics tools like Google Analytics are great at telling you what customers are doing, but not so great at telling you why they are doing it and what their motivations and feelings are. Thats's why I've always been keen to share the different types of online customer feedback service available. I was recently alerted to a new tool by Brent Coker which I think adds to tools which help the "Not What, but Why?" question. It's an interesting tool for me since it's based on academic research dating back to 2004, yet is a practical real world tool with benchmarking capabilities.…

The question in question is "Tell us what you think!". Surveying customers has always been popular, but the new opportunities for gaining feedback from customers is one of the most exciting aspects of engaging customers through digital channels for me. It's also an underrated aspect of web analytics. So when I was reviewing the 2011 cScape engagement report, the section on adoption of technology for product development and innovation caught my eye. Feedback through analytics or surveys about customers"€™ online experience, whether it"€™s website, mobile, email or social is always useful to improve the way we design experiences. But what interests me most are the opportunities for learning more about how we can improve our brand offering to customers by innovating core or value-added products or services. The classic example of this is the Dell Ideastorm approach where customers suggest product innovations and then other customers rate or comment on these. Smart! Particularly…

Gaining direct, real-time feedback from customers and site visitors is one of the most exciting areas of digital marketing for me, which really takes advantage of the real-time interactions available online. A few months back I created a post giving my recommendations on the categories and examples of feedback tools that marketers should review to help them understand their customers' needs better. Of course, Kampyle, was one of the tools featured since this is commonly used as a tool to gain feedback, so it wasn't a complete surprise, when I got a mail from Eran Savir, the co-founder of Kampyle. He said that he sees the categories of tools slightly differently than me, so I thought it would be useful to setup an interview to understand how he sees the market, in order to help site owners…