Focus Groups vs. One-on-One Interviews: How to choose which method will benefit you the most
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The #1 way to improve your business or product is simple: ask your customers.
I can’t tell you how many times people have told me something like... “Oh, you’re in market research? One time, I got paid to try a bunch of tequila flavors and tell a company what I thought!”
When it comes to getting qualitative information from your customers, you could try either focus groups and one-on-one interviews. Choosing the right method of primary research depends on what kind of information you are seeking. Many market researchers will say that one-on-one interviews are the number one way to go, however, there is a time and place for focus groups, as well.
Which method is right for you: focus groups or interviews?
Focus Groups
Focus groups tend to get a bad rap in the industry, mostly because they’ve been misused for years. In market research, participants often say one thing and do another. That means when you ask someone to describe what they WOULD do, it’s notoriously unreliable.
However, focus groups are perfect in some situations.
Here are 3 times a focus group is recommended as a part of your research plan:
Brainstorming ideas
A focus group is a good bet when you need to brainstorm ideas, directly from your target audience.
Let’s say you want to brainstorm what new features you haven’t thought of before, that people might suggest for your product, or topic ideas for your podcast, blog, video show, or other content. Focus groups are great to generate lots of ideas.
2. Learning about your audience when you’re just getting started
They’re also a good option when you are starting from scratch in getting to know your customer. With a focus group, you can invite your customers to tell you about their experience with your company, or describe how they felt during different interactions with your brand.
Even if you weren’t at all sure about who your core customers were, after just one focus group, you should be able to make a pretty good hypothesis. A round of behavioral research next can help you hone your personas even more.
3. Knowing how the public will react to a new product or situation.
Hearing people discuss their reactions and bounce ideas off each other helps to gauge what emotions a new product or situation might bring up.
Maybe you want to focus groups to pilot messaging—to get the words right before delivering a press conference or launching new messaging on your site. You might even want to use a focus group to pilot questions for a large-scale quantitative study.
Just remember that focus groups measure reactions, not behavior. They won’t give you answers, but they will help you gather ideas and measure shared sentiments.
One-on-one Interviews
One-on-one interviews are incredibly effective for getting to know your customers so that you can make strategic improvements to your marketing.
There are 3 key reasons why interviews are such an important qualitative tool to have in your market research skill set:
Interviews provide flexibility
You can make them as formal or informal as you want. You can deep-dive into pointed questions or facilitate an exploratory conversation.
Moderated interviews provide you with a lot of flexibility in designing the conversation, facilitating where it will go, and space to explore something interesting that a customer brings up that you weren’t going to ask about. You have the flexibility to go down a rabbit hole with a customer, as long as it’s helpful to the goal of your research.
2. People are getting paid to talk—so they’ll talk more
Sometimes you want to hear from a specific customer type, and learn about their personal experience specifically. You can’t do that in a large group. They’re also able to be more honest and open when it’s one-on-one.
You’ll be able to dig deeper in an interview into what they think, how they behave, their past purchases, and emotional drivers and motivations for purchase. This is where you get deep psychographic, behavioral, or emotional insights about your customers and can help you significantly more with audience segmentation, persona creation, and journey mapping.
3. Non-verbal cues
Third, we can learn a lot from non-verbal cues a participant is giving us.
Whether it’s a hesitation before they say something, or a well-placed sigh, or a shriek or excitement—it’s these types of cues that tell us more about the customer and enable an interviewer to respond to and dig deeper.
Even if you’re doing interviews virtually, this is easy to capture with a tool like Zoom.
More often than not, you’ll get the most out of one-on-one interviews. Focus groups are great for some things like brainstorming and participants bouncing ideas off each other, but not for other things like psychographic, behavioral, or emotional insights about your customers.
As a qualitative researcher, interviews are likely going to be one of your most-used skills, but keep focus groups in the back of your mind for new ideas or product testing.