The Hidden Costs of DIY Research: What Agencies Aren’t Calculating

There seem to be many benefits to doing your own market research, most of which deal are financial and time savings related. However, if you are thinking about doing DIY research, it is important to look at the whole picture before you begin. There can be many hidden costs that can arise with DIY research and not all of them are as obvious as you’d think.

This article will touch on the main hidden costs that typically come along with do-it-yourself market research. While the appeal of time and cost savings seems enticing, sometimes the hidden costs can outweigh the initial savings. Uncover the overlooked expenses and risks that can be associated with DIY research.

Time and Cost Management

Time is money. While it may seem more efficient for your team to write a questionnaire about a topic they are already experts on, think about whether they have enough experience with questionnaire development, programming, recruiting respondents, or analyzing results. All these additional factors of research could increase timing and cost as your team will need to familiarize themselves with these processes to get the most out of their data.

Additionally, think about the opportunity cost. The time that is being spent on additional training courses, trial and error questionnaire and programming development, and recruiting respondents could perhaps be better spent on your team working on something that has a direct impact on the bottom line of the company.

Subscription Based Technology & Research Tools

It is important to remember that reliable surveys and analytical tools come at a cost as well. Subscription costs for survey platforms typically are done in annual contracts and again take time and training courses to understand the full capabilities of the platforms.

Analytics software and other data visualization tools also come at an additional cost. Again, many of these with annual contracts that require many hours of experience to get a grasp on how to use these tools to your advantage in an efficient time. Not to mention the various subscription levels to gain access to the full benefits of the tech.

To optimize survey results you will need more than a base-level subscription that only allows you to ask a small number of questions in one single select question type. Consider ranking questions, heatmaps, visuals, logic set up and termination paths, these tools are essential to a successful research study but are not commonly found in base level subscriptions.

Purchasing Quality Responses: The Risks of Poor Respondent Level Data

The challenges of survey bias and bad quality respondents are easily overlooked, especially to an untrained eye.

Survey bias: If questions or survey flow are not asked or structured in the appropriate manner, you risk the chance of biasing results by asking leading questions or not providing respondents with enough answer options, forcing them to select one that may not be correct. To set up your survey correctly in a non-biasing way, you will need experienced and expert research professionals that you may not have in your team.

Bad quality respondents: When recruiting participants to take your survey, it is important to ensure you are targeting the right audience with the proper specifications. Additionally, you will need to keep an extremely close eye on the quality of responses that are coming in – sometimes respondents will select answers at random in order to complete the survey quicker because their only focus is to be rewarded with their compensation that was promised at the beginning of the survey. In the last year or so we have also seen the rise of bot responses, with answers so realistic, it is hard to distinguish them from real human responses if you do not have experience in the research field.

The risk of recruiting inaccurate or bad quality respondents can result in delivering unreliable results. If this happens, best case scenario you will have to spend more money replacing bad quality responses, but in the worst case you will make bad business decisions that can result in real negative impact to your company’s bottom line.

The Value of Professional Experience

If you are planning on doing a DIY research study, make sure you are accounting for the hidden costs that we covered: labor, technology expertise, and respondent quality risks.

DIY tools have a time and place, specifically if you are in a time crunch and planning to run a short and uncomplicated study where speed is more important than the quality of responses, then DIY tools may be the way to go – as long as you realize and are prepared to address the risks mentioned above. DIY tools are also helpful for teams with experienced researchers running the research projects, who can set them up, see them through fielding and analyze the results.

However, if you are uncertain about how to do a research project and/or you are more concerned with the validity of the data then consider partnering with a market research agency that already has the experience and proper tech to get you accurate results in a timely manner. Not to mention they can provide you with deeper insights and actionable recommendations that your team would have overlooked.