When looking to do market research for your business, you’ll need to make the decision on whether to utilize in-house expertise or hire an external firm for specific tasks or for the entire project.
If you are confident in the market research experience of your in-house staff, begin by designing the study and inspecting the plan. Through the design phase, you should determine a purpose for the market research study, a target audience you will source participants from, which methodologies you will be utilizing and how you will analyze the data.
Next, inspect the plan! At this point, you’ll be able to see if your in-house team can execute the study and analysis. For example, if you’ve determined that you will call participants and direct them to an online survey, you need to be sure you have the resources to source participants, call participants and code surveys.
During this plan inspection, if you find that your team and your resources are well-suited to execute the market research study, performing it in-house should be no problem! However if you see any gaps in the plan that your team cannot execute, then it’s time to decide whether a recruiter or full service market research firm is right for your business.
If your team does not have a long list of contacts to source from or they do not feel confident in convincing these contacts to participate in your study, a market research recruiter is right for you! Throughout a good recruiter’s career, they will have run many market research studies and therefore, they often have a pre-existing list of contacts that they can reach out to. If you have a particular target audience in mind, see if your recruiter has done any similar studies in the past as this is an added benefit to your market research. Lastly, the experience in being able to convince a person to participate in your study means that a recruiter is able to convert more contacts into participants. Therefore, even if your pre-existing list is small, a recruiter can make the most of it!
Next, if your business does not have the resources for executing or preparing the chosen methodology, then a full service firm is right for you! Besides recruiting participants, a full service firm can confirm that your design looks good, execute the study and analyze the data. They can even do just the study (coding a survey, finding participants to take the survey, etc.) or just the analysis if that is what you need.
Doing the market research study design before reaching out to a full service firm or recruiter is crucial because they will need to know the purpose of the study and the target audience before starting your project. So in the end, you really have nothing to lose by preparing a basic study design in-house and then making this decision.
Learn More
If you’re looking to do market research in-house, you want to be sure that you’re using market research best practices to get the best results! Download our free eBook “The Insider’s Guide to Using Online Surveys Successfully” to see how you should set up an online survey for success:
