How do you recruit business users for user testing

Process & Techniques
#1

The site of my boss is B2B marketing services. Target audience is business owners and CTO.
Could you share please some ideas how can I find and recruit users from this target audience?
We can offer some of our services for free as a reward but the main problem users.

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#2

I am in kind of a similar situation: finding relevant testers for our B2B shop.

We are currently discussing if we would install some kind of “customer community” within the shop were users who are interested in “helping to improve the shop” could register.
This community (a closed section within the shop) could have a discussion board, surveys, wireframe-demos a.s.o.

Our big advantage is, that we already have thousands of registered customers and if only a very small part of them are interested in helping, we have a group of relevant size for testing and more.

Another way to go would be to work with special crowd testing platforms/providers. Some of them may have users fitting your target audience. But depending on how important it is to keep some of the available data hidden from “normal people” it might be a big amount of work to change your side to hide these informations from the testers.

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#3

I don’t think this is any different than recruiting users for any other type of business. You’re still going to use the same methodology to get testers.

  • Recruit from known users. If your company keeps a marketing email list, this can be the first tool to use to look for testers. If you’ve worked with any users in the past on other projects, reach out and see if they’re interested in helping on this one.

  • Cast a wider net. Use your social media channels to put out a call for testers. This is where knowing and having some relationship with larger social media personalities in the UX world can pay dividends. You may only have a hundred followers, but if you can persuade one of your contacts with a larger amount of followers to send out a call for testers for you, you can get a much larger reach.

  • Use an agency. We all get that recruting can be a hard, long, and time-consuming process. If you have the budget and lack the will to do the work on your own, there are agencies out there who will do the user recruitment for you.

As far as incentives are concerned, you’d be surprised how little is required at times. In general, people want to help, especially if it’s a product they use frequently. Knowing they’re making an impact on something they enjoy is its own reward. Beyond that, even $5 gift cards to coffee shops can be enough of an incentive for someone to donate their time. If you take either route, it’s much better for you and your business than giving away hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars in free work.

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#4

I ditto what dougcollins said. I’ve also found success with a UX tool called PlaybookUX. We’ve recruited niche employment characteristics with them on many occasions and had a quick turn around.

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#6

Thanks for your insight!!! gave them a try and had excellent results :slight_smile: