Focus groups are essentially a way for you to gain feedback from your participants. Companies will typically use focus groups in a plethora of ways, including in marketing, planning or evaluation to improve a product or service or to develop mission statements and strategic plans.
Focus groups specifically concentrate on: - Testing assumptions.
- Gathering beliefs, opinions and attitudes about certain issues of interest in your company.
- Encouraging thoughts on a certain topic.
- Providing opportunities to learn more about an issue or topic.
- Building excitement from the different comments of participants.
Focus groups surveys are formulated as quantitative research with sometimes conclusive results. They allow you to ask questions and measure nearly anything. Your survey can be a couple hundred questions long or one question that prompts individual and group discussion.
Benefits of Focus Groups Surveys
Several benefits of focus group surveys include:
Get fast feedback. Typically, you get your information in 24 to 48 hours depending on how many respondents you have.
Get honest feedback. If participation in your focus group is voluntary, you're more likely to get honest feedback.
Get varying customer type feedback. With focus group surveys, you have the opportunity to research more than a single customer type. When you're preparing your focus group survey, you'll need to consider a few things such as
- The questions you'll be asking
- Who will be participating
- What you'll be doing with the information you gather.
Online survey software can help the moderator of the focus group, probably yourself, guide the discussions and survey questions.
Here's what you need to do:
Set Goals
Decide on what the primary things you're looking to learn from your focus group survey and the decisions you hope to implement with your feedback.
Recruit Participants
Before recruiting participants, ask yourself these questions.
- Who do you want participating in your focus group?
- Who are you looking to exclude?
- Do you want to consider your participant's demographics as well as their gender, age, profession, household income and where they live?
- Do you require a company or need their contact information to help you reach your target audience?
- Should your participants or respondents be familiar with your service or product?
Implement Practical Tips
Make sure you're writing good survey questions on your survey tool and consider preparing your participants. For instance, is there any homework or activity you would like the participants to engage in before your research starts?
Your answer formats on your focus groups surveys may include rating scales, multiple choice and open-ended questions. Try not to change your questions up too much after you’ve started your research.
As far as timing and budget, surveys provide you with a great deal of flexibility. Remember too that online survey software for focus groups can help the moderator guide the survey questions and discussions for efficiency and keep feedback on track.
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