Are you working with a mobile survey company?

If you are, you know that fielding geo-intercept surveys to consumers in real-time is powerful. But there are some considerations to make your surveys as effective as possible.

1. Ask a lot of questions.
   
   As a whole, the survey industry shies away from long surveys. We embrace it. We’ve found that consumers don’t mind long surveys, they just want to be paid for them. That’s what we do. We get a high number of survey completions on long questionnaires thanks to a well-incentivized panel and easy-to-use mobile app.
    
2. Keep things as natural as possible.
   
   A clunky experience while filling out a survey in-store can bias the outcome. You don’t want a shaky internet connection, or a poorly formatted survey, to bias and taint the natural experience of the participants.
   
   That’s why at MFour, we don’t just have a “mobile-optimized” survey process, we have a “full-mobile app” that is built to make the experience as streamlined as possible for your consumers.
    
3. Capture additional behaviors.
   
   Location-based surveys are great alone, but there’s more valuable data we can grab for you. For instance, if someone is in a store shopping for a product, wouldn’t it be nice to know what they’re searching on their mobile phone? Think about seeing what a consumer is looking at in-store and comparing to their Amazon usage before, during, and after that trip to the store. 

Not all mobile survey companies can do this, we can.

Louis Armstrong, whose 117^th birthday falls this week (Aug. 4), is one of the most recognizable and enduring personal brands in popular culture. But one of his most famous sayings seems to contradict the very concept of market research’s role in building brands.

“If you have to ask, you’ll never know,” the brilliant trumpeter (and singer of the hits “Hello, Dolly,” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and “What a Wonderful World”) replied, when asked to define “swing,” the term for the freewheeling jazz rhythm he pioneered.

But now Satchmo’s saying is beginning to make more sense in consumer insights terms, thanks to Path-2-Purchase™ Platform. This transformative new visualization tool lets you obtain a wealth of data about a representative, first-party consumer panel, without even having to ask. The result is faster, far more precise segmentation of the people you most need to talk to, and, when you do start asking questions, a leaner, more efficient survey process.  

Path-2-Purchase™ lets you eliminate most of the screener questions that bog down your research and cost you time in filling quotas and fielding your questionnaires. Now respondents  don’t have to go away frustrated and alienated from the research process because they were screened out. That keeps  them very much alive as participants for all your future projects. Meanwhile, consumers who do qualify get right to the point because they only have to answer the truly substantive questions that focus on what you really need to know. Research becomes much faster. Engagement intensifies. Data quality attains new heights. And so does the level of assurance with which you can present your findings and recommendations to your clients or stakeholders.

Take a look and play with Path-2-Purchase™ by clicking here. You’ll get a quick understanding of its potential for segmenting, targeting, surveying, and mining historical data from the consumers you most need to know.

• You’ll select among 2.3 million first-party validated consumers, based on their journeys across 12.5 million U.S. locations.

• No need to ask where they’ve been and trust their recall.

• You’ll also know them by more than 200 first-party demographic and psychographic profiling characteristics, enabling you to select validated, relevant consumers to interview without having to ask numerous screener questions.

• When you are ready to ask, you can reach them at any time and place.

• To acquire deep context for your survey data, simply append historical location, profile and survey data from our Consumer Knowledge Center.

So take a few moments to explore what a wonderful world it could be if you jump on board to select, track and gain unprecedented contextual understanding without even having to ask. Set up a live demo and conversation about how Path-2-Purchase™ can help you fulfill your projects’ specific needs faster and more efficiently than ever before, just by clicking here.

Meanwhile, Happy Birthday to Louis Armstrong, who is now at least half right about market research. Here’s something swinging from the man himself.

How awesome would it be if you, the market researcher, could get answers from hundreds of shoppers at the exact moment they’re standing in the exact aisle of the exact retailer needed to extract the exact kinds of data you need? And fast?

It would be incredibly awesome. Which is exactly why MFour Mobile Research has made this kind of research possible – make that not only possible, but easy and affordable -- by introducing MFourDIY™ --  the nation’s first do-it-yourself survey-building platform for all-mobile research.

An ongoing series of webinars is introducing the industry to what MFourDIY will let you do, and how to do it.

The topic Thursday morning was Building GPS-Enabled Surveys: A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today.” In 27 minutes, 19 attendees representing major firms and brands learned how to add this powerful survey-building platform to their research arsenals and pinpoint those thousand particular panelists

.

MFour’s Chief Product Officer, Michael Smith, started with a brief overview of why MFour’s product – advanced, highly-engineered conduits for fielding surveys strictly to smartphone users – marks a leap ahead for survey-based market research. In a nutshell, because the smartphone has eclipsed desktop and laptop computers as the public’s favored information and communications device, MFour can deliver the panel you need with far more speed and demographic range than any method that’s not fully mobile.

In Smith’s words, MFourDIY clients get “the largest panel” (one million active members, all via mobile devices) with “the most detailed demographics” (including complete, rapid responses from otherwise hard-to-reach groups such as Millennials and Hispanics).

Smith walked the webinar attendees through two actual examples to show how they can build a GPS-enabled survey. MFour had conducted the two surveys within the previous two days, testing its guarantee that you can, in fact, get “A Thousand Completes at Walmart Today” -- or at myriad other retail chains or other business venues on a list we’re adding to all the time.

It starts with having the right advanced technology: a proprietary process MFour calls “GeoValidation”®, which, Smith said, goes several steps beyond other GPS-enabled survey systems. MFour paints a locator bullseye right on the store, verifying that respondents are in fact at the store. That triggers a push notification on their smartphones inviting them to take the survey either on the spot or soon after they’ve finished shopping.

Smith noted that competing location approaches are no more than a tenth as accurate as MFour's GeoValidation®. Others will tell you whether an individual is within about 100 to 150 feet of the store; ours certifies that the person is right at the entrance. You don’t have to ask respondents whether they’ve recently been to a Walmart. You know for a fact that’s where they are right now.

In our test surveys we sought 1,000 completes from members of our mobile panel who’d been GeoValidated at Walmart stores. We were looking for 200 to respond while they were still shopping, and another 800 to answer questions after they’d finished shopping and left the store.

The survey included instructions guiding both groups to the products and displays we were focused on. Some questions tapped into the multimedia capacity of smartphones – researchers can send pictures, video or audio as the basis for questions, or ask respondents to take photos or make audio or video recordings to enhance their answers.

We captured our thousand-respondent quota easily. The average completion time was less than 13 minutes for the in-location survey, gathering 200 in-store interviews within four hours; for the after-visit survey, we landed the 800 responses we needed within 7 hours – even though we’d told those panelists it was OK to take up to 48 hours.

In-Store and After-Visit surveys are just one facet of how MFourDIY is democratizing mobile research. Take advantage of a special introductory discount at mfourdiy.com, and register for one or more of our upcoming webinars, including MFourDIY: Getting Started on May 4 and 18, and Mobile Panel 101: Reaching Millennials and Other Elusive Demographics on May 10.

Click here to learn more about MFourDIY™