qualitative marketing research

Qualitative marketing research for growth marketers

Article written by

Stuart Brameld

Why use qualitative research?

Research is undertaken (often along with quant research) to often reduce risk when making big decisions in growth. You can use research to learn more about your target audience, customer pains, onboarding friction and more.

Perhaps most important for growth marketers, user research is one of the best sources of test ideas.

Qualitative vs quantitative methods

As you likely know - quant gives you the what, qual gives you the why. Quant research will tell you that most users drop off at step 3. Qual research will help you to understand why.

Purpose: To explore ideas, concepts, or experiences vs. To quantify data and identify patterns
Nature of Data: Non-numerical (words, images, observations) vs. Numerical (statistics, metrics, graphs)
Data Collection Methods: Interviews, focus groups, observations, open-ended surveys vs. Structured surveys, experiments, longitudinal studies
Analysis: Thematic analysis, narrative analysis, content analysis vs. Statistical analysis, mathematical models, computational techniques
Sample Size: Smaller, non-representative samples vs. Larger, representative samples
Outcome: In-depth understanding of phenomena vs. Generalizable results, statistical significance
Flexibility: Flexible, can adapt during the research process vs. Structured, follows a fixed research design

What is qual marketing research good for?

Qualitative market research is particularly good in the following areas:

Providing an opportunity to listen to users and ask questions
Understanding why people are doing what they are doing
Understanding user and customer motivations

Whilst qualitative marketing research is typically performed at smaller scale, it provides rich data compared with its quant equivalent.

Qual research tactics & tooling

Modern tooling has made it easier to observe people in general now, and to gather both qual and quant data at infinite scale. Here are some popular tools and use cases.

Qualitative: User testing - See and hear real people using your website, app or prototype. Providers: Userpeek, Prolific, Ballpark
Qualitative: Diary studies - Diary studies and usability testing. Be a fly-on-the-wall as users go about their lives. Provider: Descout (recommended)
Qualitative: Session replays - Track and observe people whilst they are in a session. Providers: Fullstory (recommended), HotJar, Inspectlet, UserPeek, Mouseflow
Qualitative: Surveys - Survey customers whilst using the product, or via email. Providers: Sprig (recommended), Qualaroo, HotJar, Typeform, Informizely
Qualitative: Live chat - Let visitors tell you what’s wrong with your pages + questions, concerns, objections, and more. Providers: Zendesk, LiveChat, Olark, LivePerson, LiveAgent, Intercom, Comm100
Qualitative: Interviews - Conduct user interviews. Provider: Genway (recommended)
Qualitative: Social listening - Monitor unfiltered chatter on forums, review sites, social media (e.g. twitter), communities (e.g. reddit and slack groups) or more. Providers: Sprout Social, Brand24, Twitter advanced search, SocialInsider
Both: Heatmaps - Show which parts of your pages your visitors click on. Providers: HotJar, FullStory, Inspectlet, MouseStats
Both: Scroll maps - Identify which parts of the page are getting the most attention and false bottoms. Providers: HotJar, FullStory, Inspectlet, MouseStats
Both: Form analytics - Study how people are interacting with your forms - drop-offs, unfilled, rage clicks, errors, abandons, and more. Providers: HotJar, Zuko, Inspectlet
Both: First-party data mining - Tap into in-house data such as CRM notes, support tickets, NPS comments, and live chat transcripts. Analyze patterns, trends, and recurring themes.

Many of these platforms now also provide research-backed templates to help you get up and running quickly.

Interview best practices

Here are some best practices for conducting interviews as part of qualitative marketing research:

Preparation - Prepare an interview guide, not an interview script. The magic typically happens in the follow-up questions.
Learning - Always remember your learning goals. Research is about understanding a specific problem in order to solve a specific problem.
Humility - The one thing you are not an expert in is being an expert in the experience of the users you are trying to serve. Check your worldview and your experiences at the door.
Rapport - The interview situation is not natural for most people. You have to build rapport to put people in a comfortable state so that things come out naturally. Create conversational strands for people to pull on. Get specific, don't just go through the motions. Build connection. Create a bond.
Listening - You can't ask a great follow-up question if you aren't listening. There is an annoying human tendency to listen but really be thinking about the follow-up question. You have to listen, not think about your predetermined follow-up question. Ask why, again. Ask people to clarify what they said. Ask people to address certain emotional responses you notice when they say something.

Unstructured data & the AI revolution

Today approximately 80% to 90% of the world's data is unstructured. This includes information from sources such as text, audio, video, social media, and other formats that do not follow a predefined data model. In the world of marketing and growth, this unstructured data is increasing exponentially with Zoom recorders, Gong recordings, and other qual data from customers. There are 2 potential use-cases here:

We believe AI and LLM technology will dramatically increase our ability to leverage this blackbox of unstructured data in the near future, and we are already seeing this with tools like Microsoft Clarity Copilot. By adding structure to unstructured data, marketers will be able to use traditional analytics tools to get the best of both worlds.

Food for thought

Science does not bring absolute certainty to ideas, but rather provides a systematic way of understanding the world through observation, experimentation, and theoretical explanation.

Similarly, in growth, our goal is to gather qualitative and quantitative insights at every opportunity in order that we can better meet the needs of our users and customers needs, which ultimately translates to business value.