Understanding the target audience is crucial in any social marketing activity and research not only helps this, but also help you plan and use various marketing tools and techniques appropriately. By highlighting the needs of your clients, research can not only provide the pointers for behaviour change, but also indicate how the behaviour can be reinforced and maintained. In the end, social marketing will only truly succeed if it adopts the techniques of relationship marketing.
Focus Groups
Focus groups are often used by health authorities for the purpose of revealing ideas or attitudes on a specific health subject. They are in-depth group interviews of between 6 and 12 people.
A focus group needs skilful control using the services of a moderator who can temper the group's enthusiasm or nullify the domination of one or two strong personalities. The moderator also needs to be able to help those who find it difficult to talk, and also to inject a little fun into the group. An observer or the client is often included in the group.
Focus groups usually last between one to two hours, are loosely structured and are generally recorded. Used imaginatively, they can provide a great deal of insight about your audience.
Advantages of focus groups
- - They provide high validity
- - They are relatively low cost
- - They produce results quickly
- - They often generate new ideas
- - They can help determine choice of promotional media thus saving on the use of non productive advertising.
Problems with focus groups include group control, understanding the significance of data and moderator bias.
Panels
If you require an ongoing understanding of the attitudes of your 'consumers' or stakeholders, then a panel can provide an answer. Consultation with the panel may be online, via the post, by telephone or on a face to face basis. In any event, the panel will need continual monitoring, updating and motivating in order for it to be effective. If required, you can tap into a number of existing online panels covering GPs, Practice Nurses, Pharmacists and Hospital Consultants.
In-depth Interviews
In-depth interviews are one-on-one interviews conducted face-to-face or over the telephone. In-depth interviews are usually conducted with a number of different types of people from the target audience, and questions are normally much more 'open' than is the case for surveys.
This technique is used when the subject matter is of a sensitive or confidential nature making a group discussion inappropriate. It is also used for 'upstream' research with particular stakeholders involved with the Trust or Authority.
Telephone Research
Telephone interviewing is a cost-effective method of obtaining information when you need to cover a wide geographical area or need to talk to specific groups quickly. For maximum cost effectiveness, the interviewers you employ need to be trained to the highest level and call facilities require full automation for input of data and analysis of results. Telephone interviewing and postal questionnaires are particularly fruitful with 'warm' prospects – for example Foundation Trust members, hospital volunteers or smoking clinic attendees.
Postal Surveys
Postal surveys involve sending a questionnaire for the respondent to complete and return. Therefore the questionnaire needs to be clear, short and with an easy method of reply e.g. prepaid envelope or FREEPOST address. Respondents can be drawn randomly from a predefined list of residents/patients across the Trust's area in order to obtain a statistically valid group.
Postal surveys are more economical and less intrusive than telephone or face-to-face interviewing and can be particularly useful over a wide geographical area. They are also well suited where respondents need to consider their answers in depth.
Other Research Techniques
- - In-street, short surveys from people in public places
- - Hall tests, where people are recruited in-street and taken to a nearby location to complete the interview
- - In-home, where the survey is conducted in the respondent's home. Useful for longer or more complex surveys
- - Mystery Shopping, which involves duplicating the client experience in order to assess the level of service received from the organization.
At Mailboosters we can facilitate any of the above research methods which will be to the highest standards and within the MRS/DMA codes of conduct. You'll find our reporting factual and easy to understand; our pricing transparent. What's more, our involvement can be as much or as little as you want. Take for example conducting a postal survey - while you may wish to conduct parts of the process in house, you can choose us to write the questionnaire, or design it, or print it, or mail it through our fully automated mailing house, or data capture responses and provide a full analysis. The choice is yours.
