Are you considering conducting market research with doctors or physicians? There may not be a more difficult audience to reach and solicit feedback from.
Doctors are extremely busy and spend the majority of their time assisting and guiding patients. Trying to fit in a survey or a brief conversation for research purposes can be difficult for these medical professionals.
However, our healthcare market research firm is here to assist. The suggestions below will assist your team in ensuring that your project is set up for success and that you approach it correctly.
The suggestions cover the scope of your market research, the methodology to use, the rewards, and the timing. Use these suggestions to help guide your team or organization’s next market research study.
Before we get into the tips to help you with your market research, let’s talk about the process.
Market research should be conducted in a systematic manner.
The step-by-step procedure is shown below.
- Proposal: This is a formal request to a market research firm for a scope proposal.
- Kickoff: Once you’ve chosen a partner, hold a kick-off meeting to finalise goals.
- Workplan: This document outlines the strategy, including timelines, responsible parties, and tasks.
- Instrument design: the structure of the guide or survey.
- Testing: It is always a good idea to run the instrument through its paces internally or with live respondents.
- Fieldwork: After passing the test, you are ready to begin full-fledged fieldwork for interviews or surveys.
- Analysis begins once responses begin to arrive and data collection is completed.
- Reporting: includes a theme summary and a question-by-question breakdown.
- Debrief: Your healthcare market research partner meets with your team to go over the findings.
- Action items: these are the data-driven recommendations and strategies.
Here are some guidelines to follow and adhere to when conducting market research with doctors and physicians.
Tip #1: Make the study as brief as possible.
One thing is certain: doctors are extremely busy. Their primary goal in their profession is to assist patients. Unfortunately, their objectives do not revolve around taking surveys and conducting interviews.
Given this, it is critical that you keep your engagement as brief as possible.
As a result, doctors and physicians frequently face higher refusal rates than other business or consumer audiences. Depending on the time of year, some people may be more unwilling to help with market research than others.
Tip #1 recap:
- Keep it simple because doctors are extremely busy.
- High doctor refusal rates.
- Avoid doing end-of-the-year research.
- Surveys must be brief (10 minutes, 5 minutes, or less).
- Phone interviews should be brief (15 minutes, 10 minutes, or less).
- Isn’t it long enough? Prioritize your goals or divide your research into waves.
Tip #2: Work with the doctors' schedules.
- We all know that doctors are extremely busy and have little spare time. It is critical to target physicians who have the time to participate in medical market research. Setting those expectations in advance eliminates the possibility of future miscommunication.
- Be specific about what you want to learn from the research.As research moderators, it’s critical to understand that a doctor’s schedule may be diametrically opposed to yours–and that you may need to plan accordingly.
Tip #3: Prep the Audience.
As with any type of market research, you should seek input from your physicians before investing a significant amount of money and time in developing a new product or service. Because this new item will be marketed to a medical audience, getting the opinion of a doctor is critical.
You want to validate your concept by speaking with physicians, but you also want to ensure that you have the right product/service features and an overall offer.
Addressing potential issues and concerns raised by a medical audience ahead of time will save you time and stress.
Tip #4: Create a Screener
A screener is created for the recruitment process to ensure that the target audience is reached.
If you’re looking for physicians with specific specialties, this process can help you find them. For example, if you were looking for gastroenterologists or cardiac surgeons, you could narrow your search.
Another important aspect of conducting physician research in the early stages is thoroughly analysing the product or service in question. There may be additional qualifiers considered to be the appropriate target audience.
Tip #5: Offer large rewards.
You must pay if you want to survey physicians or doctors. You cannot expect to pay significant rewards for conducting a survey, interviews, or focus groups with this audience.
Doctors, like everyone else, have to run a business.
Many people will do the simple math if they are asked to participate in a market research study. “If I’m paid $300 per hour to deal with patients, why would I take a one-hour break to do a $100 interview with a healthcare market research firm?”
Tip #6: Conduct the research individually, not in groups.
The fourth point to consider when conducting market research with doctors is the methodology. Because doctors are extremely busy, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find a time when multiple doctors are available.
Consider in-person focus groups. If a doctor is available for a focus group at 2:00 p.m., chances are the other seven participants will not be.
If two doctors are available for a focus group at 7:00 p.m., chances are the other five are not. It is extremely difficult to get multiple doctors to show up for a specific time slot.
Tip 7: Use a vetted email list or vendor to recruit.
Think about using a market research panel. Several healthcare panel companies work with our market research firm to administer surveys and manage qualitative recruitment.
Because of the volume of work we complete with the list vendors, our firm receives contracted reduced rates from these panel companies.
Conclusion:
It is not easy to conduct market research with doctors and physicians. This healthcare audience is one of the most time-constrained B2B audiences you can reach.
As a result, it is critical to approach this audience correctly. Attempting to launch a study without following these guidelines will almost certainly result in failure.
When dealing with doctors and physicians, our team has learned a few tricks over the years. These suggestions are the result of surveys and interviews that we conducted.
Here are the 5 tips to keep in mind:
- Make it as brief as possible.
- Work around the doctors’ schedules, not the other way around.
- Provide substantial rewards.
- Conduct the research alone, not in groups.
- Recruit using a vetted email list or a vendor.
You are unlikely to get a second chance to collect feedback from a difficult audience.
Spade Survey is an India based market research firm. Our team conducts market research on doctors and physicians with various healthcare organisations across the country. Contact our team to receive a quote for a market research project Email-id:rfq@spadesurvey.com.
