Market research has long been an integral part of most marketing strategies. Pre-covid, it was not uncommon for businesses to spend tens of thousands of dollars to bring members of their target audience into a room and ask questions relevant to their brand.

Post-covid, methodologies have shifted as digital avenues have become ever more important for recruiting panels and generating insights. And with new opportunities come new challenges. The challenge? It’s often difficult to identify and reach your target audience, let alone get people to complete your survey, especially if your audience is niche. Just take a look at the below marketing survey statistics:

• Average response rates are 5-30%
• Average survey length is 10 questions
• Survey response rates drop by 17% for 12+ question surveys

Problems Market Research Face Today

Unfortunately, the above statistics are just the start. Below are three major factors market researchers experience difficulty with today:

1. Costly: You have to cast such a wide net in order to gather a substantive response level that it can be cost prohibitive. Another challenge? These reports and surveys are just snapshots in time. The information gathered will never evolve as your audience does alongside new product offerings in their current state.
2. Time Intensive: Similar to the above, traditional market research is very labor intensive and can take 6-12 weeks to complete a single project. Many small-to-midsize businesses do not have the luxury of time or necessary resources to complete this undertaking.
3. Limited insights: Most surveys can only scratch the surface in terms of audience insights, and that’s if you’re lucky enough to have members of your audience respond. The reality is, most companies never know who actually fills out their surveys and even then the questions you’re able to ask (and get a response) are extremely limited.

While the above paints a pretty bleak picture for the current state of market research, there is hope, and much of it comes as a major new development in market research – connecting social media to research panels.

How Silhouette™ Transforms Your Market Research Initiatives

How can we make marketing research more effective from both a cost and audience reach standpoint? With the help of our social audience insights platform, Silhouette™.

Silhouette takes a much more data-driven approach to market research so you can be sure you’re getting your return on investment. Here are the ways that Silhouette can transform your market research programs today:

• Run Highly Targeted Campaigns for Survey Outreach: Silhouette’s rich social audience insights and expansive taxonomy can target panelists based on their specific interests. Reach even the most niche groups and B2B audiences so you can be confident you’re recruiting members that are most relevant to your initiatives.
• Enrich Survey Panel Data With Social Audience Insights: Append Silhouette’s proprietary taxonomy of 85K+ consumer segments (individuals’ brand affinities, media preferences, influencers, personality traits, interests, and passions) to your survey panel, bringing unprecedented insights to your research.
• Model Audiences Based on Survey Respondents: Take action on your survey results and create highly customized audiences at scale to then activate across all digital media channels and platforms.
• Target Audiences Exposed To Social Campaigns For Attribution Surveys: Identify members within your audience who have previously engaged with specific social content. From there, survey those individuals to understand the impact and potential sales lift of the campaign (e.g. Did you purchase x item after seeing Kim Kardashian’s Instagram story on it?)
• Analyze Competitor Audiences: Dive into key similarities and differences between your competitor’s audience and your own to inform your future messaging and product enhancements.

Furthering Our Commitment to Market Research

At StatSocial, our clients have been equipped with extensive social insights and tools to fuel their market research initiatives since our founding. This past fall, we partnered with Cint, the world leader in panel recruitment and research insights, to deliver powerful audience insights for survey profiling, targeting, and enrichment, further enhancing our market research solutions. The partnership combines Cint’s global audience of survey respondents in 130 countries, profiled by up to 300 data points, with our global audience of 1.3 billion social accounts connected to 300 million verified individuals. This partnership allows market researchers to achieve precise and quick survey targeting, launch surveys on-demand, expand insights with social affinity data and measure brand awareness and impact. Learn more about the partnership.

Final Thoughts

Market research is transforming in the age of digital and social media, but it remains fundamental to the CMO. Social insights are transforming how market researchers reach and understand the people they are surveying.

If you’re interested in learning what else it can do to transform your market research program, let’s chat.