How to Run a Successful Focus Group
Focus groups are an immensely valuable tool for gathering feedback and ideas to improve a company’s product, service, or knowledge of their customers.
Voccii® has over two decades of experience designing and moderating focus groups in the Charlotte, NC and across the country. In this post, we’ll discuss tips for running a successful focus group.
Set Clear Goals and Objectives
First, develop your goals and objectives. Take some time to think about what you want to find out and why, before the focus group session begins.
Here are a few questions to consider before running a focus group:
- Are you trying to test new product ideas?
- Would you like to refine features, flavors, colors, etc. for your current project?
- Do you hope to learn how to target a potential new customer segment?
Developing your goals and objectives beforehand will help you get the most from your focus group.
Screen for the Right Participants
Those goals and objectives you just set will help you narrow down the type of participants that will most benefit your study. Think about who can you learn the most from about your specific questions before screening for your focus group participants. You’ll need to determine group size, customer types, target audience, and more.
- Typically, the ideal size for a focus group is around 10 people
- Your ideal focus group demographic could be relatively broad or very specific, like divorced, Asian-American men aged 45 – 60 who enjoy movies
- Are you after brand loyalists, regular users of your product or brand new customers
Design Your Questions
Awkward silence is normal in a focus group. But an effective focus group uses discussion questions to encourage an open conversation among participants.
Here are a few tips to use when designing your questions:
- Limit your questions to two to three topics so not to overwhelm your participants
- Avoid yes/no questions. Use open-ended questions to get the ‘how’ and ‘why’ from participants
- Questions should be clear, to the point, and ask only one thing at a time
Make their Comfort a Priority
Remember, your participants are taking time out of their day to help you. Provide a comfortable and relaxed environment to help them focus and avoid distractions.
- Consider a meeting time that’s convenient for participants
- Choose a comfortable and neutral environment
- Be clear and honest with your participants about how their information will help you
- Thank participants verbally or by including an incentive – if your company allows it
Record the Focus Group
It’s impossible to remember every single thing said during a focus group. There’s a lot going on, between people passing around products, and hopefully a lot of detailed dialogs! Thus, recording and then transcribing the conversation is critical to capturing accurate data. Recording a focus group session makes it easier to:
- Focus more on the direction of the discussion and covering all key topics
- Systematically analyze the qualitative data and boil it down to the important insights
- Allow others who weren’t in attendance to catch up and learn
Hire a Focus Group Moderator
As you can see, there’s more to running a focus group than just scraping a few people together, and chatting in the conference room over coffee. Obtaining biased results is much easier than you think – and it could happen without you even realizing it.
A focus group moderator is specially trained to act impartially while running a focus group. A trained moderator will control the meeting and take care of important steps:
- Guide the discussion and cover important questions
- Use strategic wording and body language to avoid bias
- Keep the schedule
At the end, your market research partners will create a report with findings and recommendations.
Designing and running an effective focus group leaves your company with useful feedback and insights. And probably more questions and a ton of new ideas to explore.
We’d love to help you design a focus group to investigate your burning questions. Let’s chat.
