A guide to online market research panels

Market research is an essential way to gain insights from your target audience about new products and services. Those insights save you time, money, and frustration, and they keep you from making the number one mistake of product development: going to market with a product that no one will buy.

Market research panels check the pulse of employees, gather public opinion on emerging topics, or benchmark a company's performance against industry competitors. These panels are a valuable resource for quickly collecting data from your target audience on what works and what doesn't. This guide covers how a research panel works, how to choose an online panel provider, and when to use one.

A research panel is composed of people who represent your target audience. The respondents reflect the demographics of your ideal customer, giving you a sample of insights across age, gender preference, income, purchase behaviors, and other traits.

Related reading: Types of sampling

Research panel respondents fill out a survey that asks specific questions related to your project's goal. You might run concept testing on a new product, a new logo design, or brand messaging to determine if panelists respond well to your ideas.

Before taking the survey, panel members are vetted to confirm they represent your target audience. This pre-qualification process makes sure you reach the right groups and improves your research study's data quality.

Surveys used to be conducted by phone or in shopping malls, limited to one-on-one data collection. Today, most surveys run through an online panel of pre-qualified participants. Online market research panels let you conduct surveys quickly, target a specific audience, and produce cost-effective, high-quality results.

Companies of all sizes use online panels for concept testing, employee feedback, and insight into new market trends. Online panel research can provide both qualitative and quantitative data, depending on the methodology you use. Panel samples can include respondents from the US or extend globally for a wider variety of insights.

"Online panel providers" is a broad category, and the right choice depends less on brand name and more on whether a provider clears five specific bars. Use this framework to evaluate any panel provider you're considering.

The SurveyMonkey panel, available through SurveyMonkey Audience and built into every LaunchPad study, is built to clear all five: a global reach of 335M+ people across 130+ countries, over 50 profiled targeting attributes, ongoing panel quality controls, results in as little as an hour for many studies, and native integration with the survey and analysis tools you're already using.

According to Nielsen, over 30,000 consumer products launch in the US each year. How do you know if yours will stand out?

Market research has been used for nearly 100 years to understand buyer motivations and perceptions. Surveys started as "man on the street" interviews and have since been refined to ask specific questions of target audiences. The purpose hasn't changed: understand what a target audience wants. The reach and impact have expanded dramatically.

Panel research helps companies avoid expensive failures by gathering customer insights before launch. Companies learn what messaging resonates, how to optimize price points, and how to create packaging that attracts customers.

Beyond market research, online survey panels play an important role across business, academia, government, and media. Businesses administer surveys to improve employee engagement, while news organizations use surveys to gauge public opinion on emerging topics.

Panelists are screened in advance, creating a large, immediately available pool of respondents who represent all the demographics of your target audience.

Research panels offer a diverse set of views, easily captured in a survey. Panel members self-report their answers, avoiding the bias that can creep in when a researcher completes all the data collection. Because respondents represent a wide variety of demographics, results include both expected and unexpected answers, which brings real value to the researcher.

Online survey panels save time and money while reducing the risk that a company makes a big mistake or misreads an important issue. They also produce quick results that help organizations stay agile and react fast to market changes.

Market panel research is flexible enough to meet a variety of research needs, whether you need a global consumer perspective for a product launch, concept testing for a brand repositioning, or an in-depth study on a niche topic.

Consider using a market research panel when the following matter to your study:

If you're studying consumer reactions or public opinion over time, a market research panel lets you kick off a longitudinal study, reaching the same target audience at different points in time to see if opinions or behaviors change. For a quick, one-time survey, sending a questionnaire to your target audience gives you immediate results instead.

If you're a bootstrapping company launching the next consumer product, you don't have money to waste on a failed one. When online mattress startup Helix Sleep had an idea for a new pillow, it needed to know if its customer base would go for it. A consumer research panel provided budget-friendly insights that evolved the original idea into a winning product.

Over 95% of new products fail. Concept testing reduces that risk. One entrepreneur had an idea for a financial services product for parents with childcare needs, and tested it before quitting her day job. Her concept proved to be a hit, but only after she refined it with her target audience.

If your product, concept, or service appeals only to a small target audience, finding the right pool of people to survey can be difficult. Because of their large respondent pools, survey companies can give you access to market research panels made up of the select group of people who represent your target audience.

Consumer panels give you insights that go beyond a short questionnaire. From open-ended questions to Likert scale responses, you get detailed responses about consumer behavior and perceptions, letting you make data-driven decisions about your concepts, brand, messaging, policies, and trends with confidence.

Some studies improve their results with a large number of responses from a diverse group. Because panel members are pre-qualified, companies can choose the right respondent count. With SurveyMonkey Audience, for example, respondents are pre-qualified using over 50 profiled attributes, so you can choose your audience based on demographics like age, income, employment, hobbies, and other representative categories.

If you frequently run market research, you can build your own pool of respondents from customers, prospects, employees, business partners, or students, but you're responsible for screening those respondents, writing accurate questions, compiling answers, and analyzing results. That's why many companies turn to survey companies for a pre-qualified pool of panelists and a research methodology suited to their project goals.

"Research panels" covers several distinct categories depending on who's on the panel and what you're studying.

Panel research aims to produce meaningful results that lead to improved products and services. Surveys serve both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) purposes.

For B2C research, companies want to understand customer behavior patterns and buying motivations. Because these companies focus on solving customer problems, they often run concept testing, brand awareness, and pricing and messaging surveys.

B2C survey questions might include:

B2C panel research shows what customers want and why they buy, which matters more than ever for running a client-centric business.

For B2B research, surveys uncover business information and behavior. They might ask about annual revenue, profits, or financial projections for the coming year, or survey business leaders about marketplace trends, or ask suppliers about their experience to uncover competitive advantages or gaps.

The Net Promoter Score, NPS®, is one type of B2B survey that evaluates how effectively a company serves its customers and business partners. NPS is a highly regarded loyalty metric: simple, quick, standardized, quantifiable, and benchmarkable.

The B2B NPS survey questions include:

Businesses depend on suppliers and business partners to stay in business, and those stakeholder groups are often just as important as customers when it comes to service and performance. Tapping into their insights with an NPS survey helps organizations find performance gaps and market weaknesses before they become a problem.

Software makes companies more efficient, but that falls apart if a software vendor's messaging can't be understood by its corporate clients.

That was the issue Apptio faced: jargon-filled marketing messaging, a long sales cycle, and a cumbersome process for collecting customer testimonials that proved its software made life better for B2B clients.

Apptio used B2B feedback surveys to create a brand message that made it easier to sell, shortening the sales cycle by 25%.

How does a nearly 60-year-old financial institution reposition itself to sell to tech-savvy millennials?

That was the challenge Raymond James, the multinational investment bank with nearly 19,000 employees, wanted to solve. It turned to an online consumer panel to find out how to reach its target audience.

Surveying 400 customers in 2 days uncovered 12 investor insights showing which social media channels it could use to better sell to millennial customers, a fast, cost-effective way to get unexpected consumer insights that improved the bottom line.

Some large companies build their own pool of pre-qualified respondents for panel research. Microsoft, for example, taps into its Microsoft Partner network of consulting and software firms that use its software solutions.

With panel responses, Microsoft uses surveys and feedback to improve the partner experience and shape the development of its Partner Network resources, offers, and programs, including playbooks used by partners on every continent.

"We can't overstate the value of a panel," Microsoft says. "Moreover, it's a great way to ensure your thoughts are heard by our leadership and teams."

Market research panels provide quick responses from a large pool of candidates about specific issues, and organizations across the globe put those results to immediate use: improving customer experience, increasing employee engagement, and uncovering audience motivations.

Companies of all sizes receive quick insights and feedback using online survey panels, often in a few hours to a few days. Since most product launches fail, having real research about what customers want reduces your market risk, improves your product, or helps you revise your messaging so your product stands out.

Survey companies have access to a large pool of respondents, both domestic and international, that represent your target customer. Panel members are motivated and quick to respond with accurate insights. Below are a few examples of people you can send your survey to using the SurveyMonkey Audience panel:

Tapping into the perceptions and motivations of your target audience will help you design a successful go-to-market strategy with the right product, logo, messaging, and pricing. An online panel also provides an objective source of opinions about your research study topic.

Traditional research methods, like phone surveys and in-store focus groups, can be difficult to execute today and are often expensive and time-consuming.

Online consumer panels provide immediate responses and valuable insights for a far lower cost, while still giving you a dependable research methodology and data quality.

An online panel provider is a company that maintains a pre-screened, pre-qualified pool of survey respondents and gives researchers access to that pool for market research, academic, or public opinion studies, instead of the researcher having to recruit and vet respondents themselves.

Market research panels is the broader category, covering any pre-qualified respondent pool used for research, including both consumer and business audiences. Consumer research panels are a subset built specifically from general consumers, used for B2C studies like product concept testing, pricing, and packaging.

Online panels for research are used any time a study needs pre-recruited, pre-qualified participants rather than a one-off list of contacts, including market research, academic research, government and policy research, and ongoing public opinion polling.

Evaluate panel size and global reach, how many targeting attributes the provider supports, its data quality and fraud-screening controls, how fast it can return results, and whether it integrates directly with the survey platform you already use, rather than choosing based on brand recognition alone.

SurveyMonkey is a leader in panel research. The SurveyMonkey Audience panel finds survey panelists for over 1,500 projects every month, helping customers collect over 100,000 responses every week.

To begin a survey, select the demographics of your target audience and how many responses you want. Choose a pre-designed, proven survey template for the type of research you want to run, and SurveyMonkey takes care of the rest.

SurveyMonkey works to make sure you receive quality data you can trust, along with analytics and reporting that are easy to read and act on, and the pool of qualified respondents is constantly updated to reflect your target customers. Whether you need a one-time survey or a long-term longitudinal study, SurveyMonkey has the panelists, templates, and reporting for your next market research study.

SurveyMonkey offers a range of market research solutions, from do-it-yourself surveys to fully managed studies. If you'd rather hand the legwork to someone else, SurveyMonkey Market Research Services can design, field, and analyze a custom study for you, from questionnaire design through the final report.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.