In my experience, getting marketing research right is more difficult than ever. The world is changing, and traditional approaches to market research aren’t working as well as they used to. One of the primary areas that marketers need to focus on is user acquisition and engagement. The following are eight major disadvantages of online marketing research.

Lack Of Trust

If you’ve ever tried marketing research online, you’ll know that you’re never going to see the results that you need in the first place. The first disadvantage of online marketing research is that you never actually know what results you’re going to get. The best you can do is try a few different approaches and compare the performance of each. Unfortunately, this kind of approach doesn’t generate the level of trust that you need in the first place. If you don’t have confidence in the data, you can’t possibly trust the conclusions that you draw from it. In short, you’ll never be completely sure that what you’re trying is going to work. This is a big problem, because when you’re trying to grow your business as quickly as possible, you don’t have the luxury of wasting time and effort with approaches that don’t work.

No Validation

Another disadvantage of online market research is that you never know whether or not what you’re doing is actually effective. This kind of research is all about generating leads, but that’s all it is. There’s no way of knowing whether or not those leads are actually going to become customers or fans of your product. This makes it really difficult to implement new strategies, because you’ll never know if what you’re doing is actually going to improve your conversion rates. If you don’t have any customers to begin with, it’s almost impossible to determine whether or not what you’re doing is working. Unless you have some way of knowing whether or not your efforts are productive, you’re always going to be wasting your time and effort with strategy that doesn’t work. The solution to this is pretty simple: get out into the field and test your theories. This means going out there and actually following up on the leads that you generate through online marketing research. Sometimes this can be as easy as sending a few emails and following up with a phone call. Other times, you may need to create a fun little experiment to really determine the effectiveness of your approach. Either way, you’ll know for sure whether or not what you’re doing is working in the field.

Now, all of these disadvantages are a big problem, and it’s not a happy camper in the trenches of online marketing research. However, there are still some advantages to this method, and I think that it’s important to highlight these advantages as well. So, here they are:

Convenience

One of the primary benefits of online marketing research is that it’s a fairly convenient way to get the data that you need. Even if you don’t have a lot of experience in this area, you’ll still be able to get the data that you need pretty easily. This is especially useful for small businesses that don’t have the in-house staff to pull all the data that they need. Online marketing research saves them the time and effort of going out and getting the data themselves. This can be a big relief, particularly if you’re already spending a lot of time working on other aspects of your business.

Accessibility

Another important thing to point out about online market research is that it’s fairly accessible to everyone. If you’ve tried to get marketing research done in the past, you’ll know how difficult it can be to get adequate sample sizes. The good thing about online marketing research is that you can generate as much sample size as you need for your analysis via an online survey. This can make it much easier to get the data that you need, particularly if you’re trying to determine a trend or an overall performance across a group of users. The most difficult part about online market research is getting people to take the time out of their day to participate. Fortunately, with the convenience of online surveys and the accessibility of the internet, this is becoming a much easier task.

Interactivity

One of the biggest advantages of online market research is that it’s completely interactive. This means that you have the ability to change the way that you’re gathering data and analyzing it, based on what you learn from the results of your experiments. As I mentioned before, there’s no way of knowing whether or not your leads are going to become customers or fans of your product. This is why it’s so important to test different marketing approaches and see which ones work best for you.

Interactivity also means that you have the opportunity to learn from the results of your experiments. This is a really big advantage when it comes to online marketing research. Say, for example, that you’ve done some A/B testing and you discover that red is the most effective color for your product. You have the option of going back and changing the way that you’re marketing your product, based on this discovery. This is an option that wouldn’t be available to you if your only source of data and analysis was in a paper form.

Scalability

One of the biggest advantages of online marketing research is that it’s completely scalable. This means that you have the ability to add more participants to an existing research project or to start a whole new project from scratch. As your business grows, you can simply expand your analysis to include more users and gain a better understanding of what is actually working and what isn’t. The only downside to this is that it can take a lot of time to get enough participants for a decent sized research project. This is why it’s important to get started early and collect as much data as you can at first. Once you’ve established a good base, it will be much easier to add more participants to your existing project or to start a whole new project.

Speed

One more advantage of online marketing research is that it’s fairly quick. The only downside to this is that it’s very easy to get bogged down in analysis if you’re not careful. If you want to be able to put the time into learning more about your business and growing your organization, you’ll have to find a way of filtering less necessary information. Otherwise, you’ll lose sight of what’s actually important and be bogged down with details that are probably not critical. This is why it’s important to have a good process for reviewing and filtering your data as you go along. Think of something that you need to keep an eye out for and flag, just so you can review the data more easily at a later point. 

When you’re looking for marketing research that’s going to be effective, it’s important to keep all of these advantages in mind. Sure, you might not know for sure whether or not what you’re doing is going to work. This is why it’s important to take a quick stab in the dark and try something new. Just make sure that you’ve got the proper validation and testing in place before you make any major changes.