Audience research
Part of Audience research for micro influencer marketing
How to run micro influencer marketing customer interviews
A practical listicle on customer interviews for micro influencer marketing, covering recruitment, consent, question design and the brief that follows.
What to take away
Micro influencer marketing customer interviews are one-to-one conversations with people who already buy in your category, to gather the wording, objections and trusted sources that shape a creator brief.
- Recruit from your own customer base and from people who bought nothing.
- Ask about past behaviour, not intent.
- Get consent before recording and say how long you keep the notes.
- Code every transcript against a fixed list.
- Keep phrases that repeat, and drop anything raised once.
What counts as a customer interview for this work?
A customer interview is a recorded conversation of roughly 30 to 45 minutes with someone who matches your buying criteria. It is not a focus group and not a sales call. The useful output here is the wording people use about a problem, plus the creators and communities they already follow.
Interview inclusion criteria
- 30-45 minute recorded conversation
- Not a focus group or sales call
- Purchase or active consideration in 12 months
- Follows at least one niche creator
- Record UK nationEngland, Scotland, Wales, NI
Apply two inclusion criteria at the outset: a purchase or active consideration in the last 12 months, and a genuine following of at least one niche creator in the category. Consumer protection rules differ across the UK, so record whether each participant is in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before you generalise.
How should you recruit participants without skewing the answers?
Recruit in two waves. Wave one comes from your own order list, filtered for recency. Wave two comes from people who browsed but did not buy, whose reasons a creator often has to answer on camera. Recruit a mix of recent buyers and people still deciding, and note the region of each.
Two-wave recruitment sequence
- Write one-page screener first
- Wave 1: recent buyers from order list
- Wave 2: browsed but did not buy
- Note region and discovery platform
- Check ICO broker due diligence
- Screen out marketers and past-year interviewees
Write the screener before you book anyone. Keep it to a page, and include the platform where each person found the creator.
If you buy audience data through a broker, the ICO's guidance on organisations using marketing services of data brokers sets out the due diligence expected of you. That includes checking lawful basis and consent, before recruitment rather than after.
Screen out anyone who works in marketing, and anyone you interviewed in the past year. Both distort the sample.
Which questions actually produce usable answers?
Ask about the last time, not the next time. "Walk me through the last time you looked for this" produces a story. "Would you buy this?" produces a guess.
- What were you trying to get done when you last bought something like this?
- What did you look at before deciding?
- Whose opinion did you check, and where did you find it?
- What nearly stopped you?
- What would have made the decision faster?
Five questions is the ceiling. Follow up with "tell me more" instead of a new question, and let silence work. Record only with consent, and note it in the file.
Pilot the list with two colleagues before the first interview. Cut any question that invites a yes or no answer.
Avoid your own product language in the question list. A phrase that only exists in your marketing copy will not turn up in a transcript.
If participants keep naming the same handful of creators, that is a signal for the next stage. The micro influencer marketing audience research guide covers that audience work in more depth.
How do you turn transcripts into a creator brief?
Code every transcript against a fixed list: problem wording, objection, trusted source, competitor, channel. Then count how many interviews raised each code. Tag each quote with the interview number so it can be cited later.
| Before coding | After coding |
|---|---|
| Eleven transcripts, 40 pages of notes | Five recurring problem phrases |
| A vague sense that price matters | Price raised in nine of eleven interviews, always monthly |
| Creators named from memory | Three creators named by four or more participants |
| No shared vocabulary | Brief wording lifted from participants' own sentences |
Anything raised once stays out. Anything raised by half the sample goes in, with the participant's own words attached.
Before a creator publishes, check the claim against the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008, which govern misleading commercial practices. For the CAP Code side, the CAP eLearning modules cover the advertising rules for branded content.
Once the brief exists, the next question is who it should reach. The micro influencer marketing target audience page matches a brief to a segment rather than a broad demographic.
Common questions
How many interviews do I need?
Eight to twelve is usually enough to see repeated themes in one product category. Stop when two consecutive interviews add nothing new.
Should I pay participants?
A small thank-you improves attendance. Keep it modest, and record it in your notes.
Can I use these interviews as market data?
No. They are qualitative. Use them for wording and objections, then size anything quantitative with a survey or published statistics.
Do I need consent to record?
Yes. State the purpose, the storage period and who will hear the recording, and get agreement before you start.
