Corporate business leaders, managers, and market researchers require the best tools to collect relevant data and facilitate informed decision-making. When selecting a market research program, stakeholders must recognize skill and resource considerations. An appropriate system will excel at research, data quality assurance, and reporting customization. This post will explain how companies can choose the right one for their research needs.
How to Choose the Right Tools for Your Research
1| You Must Understand Your Research Goals
Finalizing the ultimate research objectives is crucial before exploring available platforms. This step ensures you will not overspend or underinvest in the market research tools. By doing so, you can avoid the risk of the results not meeting your requirements, which could dampen stakeholder faith in the reliability of the research.
Therefore, leaders and market researchers must introspect. Consider the following questions.
- What business development or product design questions do you intend to answer?
- Do you prioritize insights into customer satisfaction, market trends, the competitive landscape, or employee engagement?
When you list the available market research tools, let these questions be your guiding compass.
2| You Must Strategize How Data Collection Will Proceed
Some tools, particularly cloud-powered ones, are designed to excel at online surveys for qualitative market research. These tools can automate form presentation and insight reporting, ensuring efficient and accurate data collection and reporting. Additionally, artificial intelligence chatbots can enhance respondent experiences throughout the surveys, improving the overall process.
Each market research tool offers a unique approach to collecting, processing, and reporting dataset components. However, the key is to choose a tool whose data collection strategy is the most relevant to the desired business insights. This adaptability is crucial, as your data scope expectations and target audiences’ preferences might require indirect data gathering instead of real-time feedback collection. A tool that can meet these diverse needs will be a valuable asset to your research efforts.
Well-evaluated market research tools must deliver flexible data acquisition modes that can adapt to different research needs and allow for various data collection methods. These tools should also provide cross-platform data connectors and ease of import-export operations. Their workings must prevent potential conflicts with customers’ schedules and time-to-insight expectations, which refers to the amount of time it takes to gather, process, and analyze data to produce actionable insights.
3| You Must Examine Each Software’s Analytical Features
Data analytics reveal why some products perform better than competitors in the segment. Therefore, market researchers must study each tool by reviewing brochures and scanning hardware-software specifications. The latter can be optional if the tool is completely cloud hosted.
An ideal market research and analytics platform must offer user-friendly dashboard visualization, statistical modeling, and predictive insights. Comprehensive reporting and forecasting of consumer purchasing activities are highly demanded features.
4| You Must Assess Integration and Compatibility with Existing Technologies
Backward compatibility is integral to implementing newer programs without hurting data reliability or availability. If you get a new market research tool incompatible with your existing toolkit, the software conflicts will compromise historical reports. As a result, you will witness time-to-insight (TTI) increases.
Moreover, multiprogram integration will be challenging if underlying data handling methods do not comply with development standards. Nobody wants to suffer from application programming interface (API) errors. This obstacle indicates a need for due care throughout market research tool selection.
Conclusion
Market researchers wanting to choose the best tools based on stakeholders’ research and analytics requirements must consider data collection and integration risks. Otherwise, they might lose access to historical intelligence assets while spending longer on tech troubleshooting. Still, responsible leaders can collaborate with skilled professionals to reduce implementation complications.
Given the rise of new data-gathering approaches, like context-aware chatbots, market researchers must prioritize adding cloud-powered platforms to their toolkits. If your competitors have invested in those modern data acquisition tactics, delaying adoption will only widen the competitive gaps. In other words, you want to revisit your market research tools and identify improvement opportunities before rivals surpass you.