Market Research

@ Sprout Social

Qualitative + Quantitative

Project Summary

Project Overview

I conducted biannual Audience Insights Surveys to understand target market segments' priorities, excitement, challenges, and current solutions in the industry.

Research Objective

My goal was to deliver relevant, timely insights to marketing teams, enabling customer-focused campaigns, relevant messaging strategies and solutions.

Impact of this Research

This research aligned marketing strategies with customer needs, highlighting areas to align to audience language to craft compelling content and address their challenges proactively. Insights also revealed a missed opportunity to adopt our audience’s language, such as emphasizing terms like "attribution" and "earned media value" over internal jargon like ROI, to better resonate with their priorities in showcasing business value.

“I wanted to take a moment to thank you for the time and effort behind the audience trends research. It’s been incredibly valuable in keeping our Insights content hyper-relevant to our ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). I feel like I’m constantly referencing the deck, for everything from content creation to freelancer coaching to event abstracts. It’s a life saver.

The deck recently came up during a conversation with the SEO team, and they found it helpful, as well. They’re interested in understanding the cadence of its creation and how they can stay informed about new editions!”
— Ronnie, Sr. Content Strategist

Survey Preparation & Data Collection

During the project kickoff, my collaborators and I defined key goals of this research with stakeholders, aligned on the questions we would ask and the target audience.

I drafted survey questions, and they were reviewed by my peers and senior stakeholders.

I then launched the survey and collaborated with our survey & recruiting vendor, Glimpse, to ensure our audience parameters and vet participants for quality responses.

  • We collected 412 survey responses within relevant audience parameters.

  • Using Google Sheets, I conducted thematic analysis of open ended responses to quantitatively code themes.

  • I then conducted statistical analysis of the most prevalent qualitative themes and all quantitative responses.

  • I also created cross tabs using Google Sheets, to statistically analyze relationships between the qualitative and quantitative data sets to determine if any demographic or firmographic variables patterned in significant ways with particular themes.

I collaborated with a Sr. Social Media Analyst to build a deliverable that would showcase relevant insights, using data she had gathered via social media listening research and combining those insights with insights I distilled from survey analysis.

We structured our deliverable to highlight:

  • themes and insights that were top of mind for the company's prospects

  • how audiences’ perspectives have changed since the last iteration of this survey

  • the relationships between themes and other quantitative variables, like job seniority (ICs vs. Leaders) and organization audience focus (B2B vs. B2C)

  • and most importantly, the opportunity areas where marketing teams should pursue creating content that could break through a saturated market, direction on which areas of the product to advertise that would offer solutions to problems prospects are facing currently, and more.