By Sam Nguyen
CEO Avada Commerce
A focus group is a critical method that helps businesses understand their customers’ insights better and gain helpful feedback for their companies. Asking the right focus group questions is essential for the success of their market research, giving them a multi-participant discussion about the products and services.
Effective focus group questions will help businesses interact with customers more closely and drive the talks towards their wanted outcome. Understanding the importance of it for any company, we have this article that is about to cover what you need to know about focus group questions and 20+ effective focus group questions to gain in-depth customer mindsets.
Before the ultimate guide on creating focus group questions, let’s dive into the definition of a focus group.
A focus group is a small group of people who are carefully chosen to contribute to open discussion for market researches. The hosting organization selects this group with an attempt to represent the larger population they are about to target.
The subjects the group focus on are perhaps new products, feature updates, or other topics of interest to discover the insights and reactions of the general population. Among those participants, one crucial position is the moderator. Who taking charge of the moderator has to ensure legitimate results and reduce bias in the discussions. The term Focus Group was named in 1991 by a marketing and psychological expert Ernest Dichter.
In general, the term is simply defined as meetings held in a limited group of people to discuss. Some of the focus group’s features are:
There is more than one method on market research, but the Focus group method is considered the most beneficial one thanks to its distinct advantages over others. They include the role of the moderator in communicating with members and balancing the flexibility to move the discussion. As a result, insights, and opinions can be more meaningful than ever.
One common mistake when understanding the key role of the focus group is attempting to reach a consensus or agreement on the topic. Otherwise, it targets identifying and understanding customer insights of a brand, product, or service.
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Still, there are many methods of market research targets discuss a topic in detail and collect in-depth opinions. However, the focus group method is one of the minorities that are particularly valuable for marketers in our digital age. It is important since marketers can easily get a more in-depth insight into consumer interests, attitudes, motivations, and perceptions.
In turn, they can withdraw the way and the reasons leading to their behaviors and reactions. Nowadays, focus groups are commonly used by small businesses and high-volume brands. For instance, Disney, Twitter, and Starbucks rely on focus groups to promote their products and raise the total market share.
Focus groups can be used in most cases. Here are the five most common situations when they are used:
While the typical survey research provides the raw data to validate or invalidate assumptions, focus group research works well in giving a greater depth of inquiry generating much more nuanced insights into consumer’s reactions. In particular, it results in valuable and layered feedbacks that you hardly obtain via quantitative research methods.
In case you are looking for the way your customer’s opinions are created and expressed in a collective context, focus groups can also help.
The importance and advantages of focus groups are claimed by many marketing experts. As Janet Salmons, principal consultant for Vision2Lead and author of the book Doing Qualitative Research Online, shared: “Focus groups are beneficial when you are interested in how participants respond not only to the product or service in question but also to each other and the mood of the group as a whole.”
Nonetheless, it doesn’t mean you just open the meeting and wait for the positive results. To benefit from focus groups, you need to spend more time and effort asking quality questions. The stronger focus group questions are, the more useful information will be gathered. Keep in mind to raise well-thought-out focus group questions that are clear and free of bias to reach the research objective. Only when you do so can information be reflective of customers’ thoughts and feelings.
Unfortunately, doing so is not that easy. When conducting a focus group and open a discussion, you need to consider the following drawbacks:
Anyway, the advantages of focus groups outweigh its cons. Let’s take a look at more detail about this effective market-research method.
There are a variety of types of focus group questions that can be asked by participants within the normal market research discussion. Here we bring about the three main categories of focus group questions.
As stated by Salmons, Introductory questions are those asked at the beginning of a focus group meeting, they should “establish a safe space within the group.” Indeed, they are suggested to be related to something eliciting stories about a common experience. Introductory queries are responsible for stimulating the members to interact with others and quickly promote a sense of community.
Being also known as Engagement questions, they are usually applied with a purpose to push participants talking about the research topics. Since they are put right after the group meets, such questions should be general and easy to answer. They can be:
As the name says, Exploration queries are those raised to dig deeper into the particular research topic and evoke answers from participants in detail. Their mission is discovering the insights, needs, demands, and concerns of members via their opinions and responses. Here are such important questions that they should be designed carefully to draw out as much data from participants as possible.
They can include:
Note: One optional type of focus group question is follow-up questions being put after primary exploration questions being asked. Though they are not compulsory, follow-up queries still take charge of digging deeper, gathering more data about an interesting assertion, clarifying any points that are not clear, or inviting other members to share their comments and opinions on the subject.
After going deep into the research topic, participants often come right to the Exit questions. They are designed to end up a focus group discussion, wrap up all important things mentioned during the conversations, and make sure nothing has been left undiscussed. Easily put, exit questions have to be asked to ensure all aspects of the topic have been covered completely.
Some of them may be:
Now it’s time to apply that knowledge to your businesses. But first, let’s look at how to write good focus group questions through the following advice. They will make sure that you create questions that bring about qualitative information and much value to you.
First and foremost, you need to start with the end goal and work backward. That means clarifying your objectives before the meeting by raising the question, “What are you hoping to discover by conducting a focus group?”.
You should identify in mind what you will get as a result of the discussion and predict the sort of effects you would like to achieve at the end of the session. Then, remember to use those insights and brainstorm queries that work well to extract the kind of data you need the most.
One key to being successful in focus group questions is making your group members understand your points. So, it is extremely important to keep your questions short, straightforward, and unambiguous. What you ask them must be immediately clear. A question, especially one from the exploration group, should have just one or two parts. Those with multiple parts can be understood in various ways. The ways they comprehend can directly devote to the success of the discussion.
For example, if they understand in the wrong way, you will have to raise more questions to drive them in the right direction. The lengthy questions will then possibly result in confusion among members. By making them as simple as possible, you will save time and gain higher quality feedback.
Remember that you cannot lengthen the focus group meeting for the whole day. You just have limited time with your group members, so the number of questions asked must be limited to. The list of focus group questions should range from 8 to 12 in total to maximize quality.
To get the most value, let’s write down what you are about to ask first as a script. Then, go through your script and get rid of any question that you feel does not deserve to be there. Make every question count and delete those that are not about to bring about new data or answered via other means.
Finally, before applying the list of your questions to the real meeting, make sure you test them by running a pilot. It is because your questions may look great on the draft but possibly fail to deliver in practice. What’s more, you won’t look for recognizing that this is the case in the live focus group setting, right?
Once those wrong questions are used, the result can be very negative. So, keep in mind to assemble a few individuals before and trial the question list with them. When using the pilot, if there are any questions resulting in the confused inclusions or that they are measured to be ambiguous or redundant, do not hesitate but find this out in the pilot run and adjust to gain the best questions.
As we have mentioned, these questions are often open-ended, which is to set the tone for the focus group. So, remember to ask those questions to steer and drive the discussion in the direction you want it to go. Let’s look at some samples of it:
Then, it’s time that follow-up questions are used to dig deeper into the topics. So, choose the topics you want to discuss the most and expand from them. Be sure to keep them short and comprehensible. Now, we will give you more examples of each type of follow-up question.
This is when you can ask direct questions about your rivals within the market to figure out what your company can do better to beat them out or what your strengths are to be promoted. When answering those questions, your customers will surely reveal what they like and dislike. You will then provide the best service for the market. The key target of this type of focus group question is focusing on the decision making process for purchasing as well as the reasons why customers buy:
To adjust your products in the right direction and gather more productive data, you have to find out what your consumers are not satisfied with currently. Ask them to the root cause of any problems you are suffering from. What’s more, the features they are unhappy with are the reasons why your customers do not choose your products but your rival’s ones.
There are many cases when businesses make the wrong changes that customers do not expect. So, that’s why you need to ask questions about the positive aspects of the product. That means asking what features your product is doing better than your competitors. In this way, you will not only know what will be important and beneficial to the product and consumer but also avoid changing the aspects that customers are enjoying.
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You will now have a chance to know more about the specifics of your products. The more information you know about this area, the better you make specific improvement changes to your product after the end of discussing. That is, asking your customers about what exactly works well or doesn’t work well in this product or what they will do differently with these features if they were in charge.
Those questions are not usually used, which are more pointed than overall exit questions. If you are not sure whether there may be a general feeling from customers about you that you have not touched. That’s an excellent way to add detailed questions and know a general feel from your member, making them use or not use your products.
It is the last type of follow-up question which is asking your participants to expand on their answers.
Before reaching the end of the meeting, you can use this type of question to avoid existing group bias since they often are yes/no questions, forcing every member to answer. Though you might want to gain as many detailed questions as possible, those face-value queries still work if you are going to quantify data since they allow you to count specific answers and apply statistical techniques.
Now, it’s time for the exit questions to make sure nothing has been left undiscussed. Those are to invite participants to fill any holes in the conversation to avoid any lingering doubts.
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So, the questions asked in a focus group are undeniably important. How they are created will directly devote to the results of your products as well as the whole company. Remember to prompt your customers more often to get the most valuable information from them and keep them feel as comfortable as possible. By doing so, you will have more chances to gain a wealth of feedback and information to analyze.
Take what we wrote as a suggestion, apply the tips above to your businesses, and focus on setting up strong questions, you will surely see the positive results of the smooth discussion.
Hopefully, you will find something helpful in our post today, which will contribute a bit to your business’s success. If there is still something you don’t understand about the focus group questions or want to know more about it, do not hesitate to ask in the comment section. We will reply to you soon. Thank you!
