Recruiting research participants from outside of your own network can be challenging, but there is a lot you can do without having to go to a third party vendor for leads.
I’m of the opinion that you should aim to recruit at least some share of your research participants outside of your own network for most projects, both in order to achieve expanded reach as well as to get a greater diversity of viewpoints. The latter is key if you look to understand the needs and perspective of new customers or do competitive analysis.
The cost of recruitment in terms of time and budget rises substantially when you use external channels. There are pros and cons in doing it yourself vs hiring a vendor to do it, but even if you plan to use vendors, I’d encourage you to experiment with the below channels yourself (and vice versa, you should experiment with using third party recruitment vendors even if you plan to do most recruitment in-house).
This post covers the most common external recruitment channels, with pros and cons for each one.
If you spend any time on LinkedIn, you have likely been contacted by a research recruiter. Many recruiters use LinkedIn as their primary sourcing channel. You can pretty easily do this yourself, though be prepared to spend a lot of time per completed recruit.
LinkedIn is one of the best channels for recruiting participants for business-related projects (e.g. business models, price elasticity, sales process, etc). As a space for business networking, respondents tend to be very open to discussing commercial topics.
I’ve found LinkedIn to work fairly well for recruiting for interviews, though the labor cost in terms of researcher time spent doing in-house LinkedIn recruitment can be pretty high. I’ve never tried using LinkedIn for surveys, as the total cost per complete (incentives + recruiter time) will be prohibitive for all but the most high-value survey work.
Recommendations
- Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date – have a professional-looking profile, keep your employer info current, and ensure that your job title matches what’s in your message.
- Sign up for LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Sales Navigator is an invaluable tool if you want to do any serious LinkedIn recruitment. It allows you to segment and identify the right target profiles, and it gives you more InMail messages. $100/month and well worth it.
- Specify that you’re a company employee – people are more likely to respond to a named company employee than to a third-party recruiter.
- Be selective in who you contact – there’s a limit to the monthly number of InMails you can send, so don’t spam any profile that looks appropriate. Focus on high-quality candidates.
REDDIT & THIRD-PARTY FORUMS
I have had decent success recruiting participants through Reddit. If you have a subreddit dedicated to your product (e.g. /r/unity3d) or to the general topic (e.g. /r/gamedev), there are a large number of knowledgeable enthusiasts, many of whom are professionals, available to tap into. The same goes if there are independent subject matter forums or Discord channels dedicated to your industry.
It’s important to remember that these spaces are intended for enthusiasts to connect and exchange ideas, so just because you are from a company that they’re discussing, that doesn’t necessarily make you welcome in the space.
Recommendations
- Create a company account for the recruitment post – don’t post from your own account. If possible, it should be visibly ‘official’, and tied to the company in some way.
- Ask for permission to post – contact the subreddit/forum mods before posting any feedback requests.
- Make it clear you’re only looking for feedback – be explicit in your messages to the mods and in your post that you’re only seeking feedback, and there is no sales or marketing component. Trying to promote your product in a forum is a quick way to get banned.
- Experiment with promoted posts (?) – I’ve never tried using promoted Reddit posts as an alternative to native forum posts, but I’d expect it might work as well, and it’s definitely worth a try.
SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING
Social media ads are a really effective channel in recruiting for consumer surveys. I haven’t found it as useful for B2B surveys, but I believe that it should be feasible for certain industries, so I’d suggest it can be worth trying. Most social media ad platforms are self-service and have pretty low ad CPM’s, so you can experiment quickly and cheaply and see if this is a channel that makes sense for you.
If your company is already running social media ads, connect with your marketing team and see if they can help you run an experiment. You will likely have to contribute the budget, but it should be less than $500 to test it out.
I’ve found Facebook Ads to work best, with Twitter seeing very poor click-throughs on survey links, and I wouldn’t think it’s even worth trying more image-focused networks like Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok.
REFERRALS
Referrals from research participants can be a very powerful recruitment mechanism, and they also often let you to expand your target personas to new market segments that you hadn’t considered in your own initial plans (e.g. if your participant says ‘oh yeah, my friend, who works in industry XYZ, would also be really interested in your product, let me connect you with her’).
When conducting interviews, always include a section at the end of the interview where you ask the respondent:
- If they can think of anyone in their network that you should speak with, and if they can put you in touch with them.
- If there are other roles or personas that they think you should interview, and why they believe it would be valuable for you to speak with them.
TRADE SHOWS & CONFERENCES
If your company is attending industry trade shows and conferences and has a booth on the show floor, this is a great way to do short (1-3m duration) intercept interviews of people who walk past your booth, as well as recruiting for a research panel. Don’t expect to be able to do any in-depth research at these events, but if you can figure out how to make use of these short-form interviews, you can gather a lot of data quickly and cheaply.
If you have the luxury of a conference organized by your company (e.g. Dreamforce, WWDC, etc), this is a fantastic opportunity to conduct more serious research. Ideally get yourself a dedicated meeting room to conduct interviews and focus groups, and you will want to get early access to the participant list and send out invites before the conference starts.
Third-party conferences where you don’t have show floor presence are more challenging. You are unlikely to have access to the participant list, and there is no captive audience that you can recruit from. You might still end up with some useful ad-hoc conversations through networking and socializing, but don’t expect to be able to do much formal research.
TRADE ASSOCIATIONS & INDUSTRY NETWORKS
Some industries have trade associations or other industry networks that connect companies in their sector. If your industry has that type of formal business networks, it can be worth contacting these organizations and inquire about the opportunity to connect to their members. This is not a channel I have had much success with myself, but it can be worth looking into.
Photo by Sigmund
