What Is Market Research?
Research is an important part of understanding our audiences. Market research can provide us with key data on audience opinion, viable communications tactics, and more. Students, parents, and other stakeholders in the admissions process have a lot of opinions on what they want. We should listen to them! Listening to our audiences will improve our communications and marketing efforts.
If you’re planning on your own research efforts, let us know. Ask for any help or advice you might need and be sure to share the results of your research. Research in one area of campus can likely help other areas, too.
Our Research Efforts
Each year, we send out an accept/decline survey as well as a variety of visit evaluation surveys meant to improve our processes and set baselines for student opinion. We use the data we collect to study trends about what our audiences like, dislike, and engage with. While much of our data comes from our communications efforts and online platforms, we also create and field surveys of our own.
If you’d like some analysis on our market research, check out our presentation detailing accept/decline results.
Other research we’ve done in the past includes:
- who is our pop-up audience and what information do they want? (survey of those who provided an email address through our pop-up form on the admissions website)
- online video viewing habits of high school students (survey)
- advertising concept effectiveness in relation to admissions audiences (study)
- what students love about Illinois (survey)