In a crowded retail landscape, it’s more important than ever to have access to accurate and actionable data about your target audience. For example, while price will always be a leading factor behind purchase decisions, where does it sit for specific brands, products and stores?
What’s more, many of today’s consumers crave relevance, demanding experiences tailored to their unique needs and desires. Brand differentiation, reputation and customer-centric policies now heavily influence the choices of these consumers but deciphering the exact weight of these factors in purchase decisions can be complex.
A game changer for businesses is YouGov Self-serve which allows users to create their own, fully customizable surveys and gather consumer insights in a matter of hours.
Our user-friendly survey platform helps alleviate the uncertainty that comes with guesswork and empowers retailers and marketers to make informed decisions about the retail industry, their target customers, competitors and products.
We’ve seen the power of Self-serve research firsthand. Here are just some of the benefits of using our customer-centric, market research:
- Sharper targeting: Know your audiences’ demographics, psychographics and shopping habits. Craft messages that resonate with how your audience lives and thinks, allowing you to cut through the noise and have a great chance of influencing purchases.
- Cost-effective: Self-serve research can be significantly cheaper than other research methods. Starting at 0.80p per survey complete, retailers can maximise their ROI further by targeting only the types of consumers they need such as customers of their own brand or those of a competitor’s.
- Fast and efficient: You can launch your research projects, have them quality-checked in minutes and get results back within 24 hours. Need it sooner? YouGov Self-serve offers highly targeted rapid research surveys with results in a matter of hours.
- Easy to use: YouGov Self-serve is designed to be user-friendly, even for those with no prior experience with market research. You don’t need any special skills or knowledge to create and launch your research projects. Plus, we have a dedicated research team available 24/7 to answer questions and offer feedback to get your survey off the ground any time of the day.
Give it a go. Run your first survey up to the value of £250 completely free*.
Get started with a free £250 survey
Subscribe to Retail Gazette for free
Sign up here to get the latest news straight into your inbox each morning
How brands are using Self-serve research
Businesses of all sizes and types are using YouGov Self-serve to gain valuable insights from their target audiences such as consumer preferences and attitudes, brand awareness, pricing sensitivity and advertising effectiveness.
We’ve helped clients test out product ideas, identify what’s most and least important to customers and boost their pitch documents. In addition to this, we recently conducted our own targeted research empowering both brands and their rivals to gain invaluable insights into consumer behaviour heading into 2024.
Let’s look at how clients have used Self-serve and some of the ways the research tool can be applied.
1. A/B test for products and messaging: We helped a well-known drinks manufacturer test label designs for new product concepts before launching them to the market. The brand received results back within 24 hours and used the consumer insights into different label options to guide their internal decision-making process.
2. Measure brand awareness: A beverage company wanted to get a sense of how well-known their products were to customers in a pub setting. We helped them home in on young pub-goers for a custom study asking about their experiences with the brand’s drinks as well those of its competitors. The data then guided them in planning further, in-depth research on brand positioning and strategy.
3. Back up pitches and decisions: One fast-food agency wanted to test the names of potential meals for Christmas following a last-minute menu name change request from a client. Using Self-service research, they responded within hours, after crafting a quick survey.
The results? The client’s preferred name confused regular customers, who overwhelmingly favoured other options.
4. Understand brand perceptions and consumer preferences: Using Self-serve’s unique ‘Customers of’ functionality, YouGov conducted a poll among Britain’s Lenovo customers to measure how satisfied people were with the brand’s products. From build quality to battery power, we collected opinions across several key parameters to empower Lenovo and its rivals to understand its strengths among people who buy its products.
5. Get consumer reactions to brand news and crises: Following news that the UK government made a business decision to opt out of advertising on X/Twitter, while continuing to advertise heavily on Facebook and Instagram, we reached out to X/Twitter users using the ‘Customer of’ function to gain insights into this specific audience.
The research revealed the habits and sentiments of X/Twitter users and illuminated how they felt about the volume, quality and trustworthiness of ads on the platform.
Self-serve research is a powerful tool that can help businesses of all sizes gain valuable insights from their target audience. If you’re looking for a way to get quick, cost-effective, and actionable data, YouGov Self-serve can help you unlock what’s on your customers’ minds of both yours and your competitors.
Try YouGov’s self-serve survey building platform today and get £250 in free credit* for your first survey!
*Receive £250 credit directly to your YouGov account within 24 hours of registering when based within the UK. Credits must be utilized by October 20, 2024. Please note, Self-serve cannot be used to ask about political issues, enquire about personal or sensitive issues, or be cited or published in the media. If you do require any of these functionalities, speak to the YouGov team.
Click here to sign up to Retail Gazette‘s free daily email newsletter
