Insights communities: Pros and cons for market and customer research

As an extremely valuable research tool that brings together a group of customers or prospects, an insights communityenables you to engage and seek feedback regularly. Whether you need fast answers for a time-sensitive business decision, or more in-depth insights, communities are a tool you need in your toolkit.

Not only can they help you better understand shifts in the consumer landscape to make business decisions, but they can also enable you to engage hard-to-reach groups such as Gen Z. Additionally, today's mobile-first, conversational approaches can drive high response rates and greater depth of disclosure by making it easy to uncover in-the-moment insights.

In this article, we'll cover the following topics:

• What are insights communities?
• What are the benefits and limitations of insights communities?
  • Cost and speed
  • Traditional management challenges
  • Data quality and fraud minimization
  • Biases in insights communities
  • Reducing bias
  • Enabling rapid action, activation and storytelling
  • Not ideal for some research use cases

What are insights communities?

Insights communities (often referred to as "insight communities" or "research communities") are groups of people brought together by a company or organization to provide feedback, ideas, and perspectives on products, services, or brand experiences.

These online research communities - typically consisting of customers, fans, target consumers, or other stakeholders - can act almost like an online focus group where participants participate in activities designed to generate insights.

Companies use insights communities to stay connected with their audience and gain a deep understanding of their preferences, needs, and motivations over time. Unlike one-time surveys, insights communities offer a longitudinal approach to gathering quant, qual and video feedback. An evolution of market research online communities (or MROCs), insights communities can be used for longitudinal and iterative learning. They can help reveal trends and patterns that help influence product innovation, marketing strategy and customer experience initiatives.

What are the benefits and limitations of insights communities?

At Rival and Reach3, we love insights communities. (After all, we made a solution called Community 2.0 that many awesome brands use for research and customer engagement!) But we also recognize that it's not a silver bullet.

If you're wondering if an insights community is right for your business, here's a quick rundown of the major pros and cons.

Pros: Cost and speed benefits

Insights communities offer significant time savings and efficiency by providing on-demand access to your most important audiences. Unlike ad hoc methods, which often require fresh recruitment for each study, communities allow you to engage an established group of participants repeatedly. This means you can quickly gather feedback, track trends over time, and respond swiftly to emerging insights-all without the lag or costs associated with re-recruiting participants every time you do a survey.

Once set up, mobile-first communities, like Rival's Community 2.0, leverage the convenience of SMS invitations. This approach works really well because it makes it easy for participants to engage instantly on their devices, in real time, and in their natural environments.

This immediacy translates to faster response times, higher engagement, and richer, in-the-moment insights that better reflect participants' true feelings and behaviors. With insights communities, brands benefit from a streamlined process that supports rapid, flexible and agile research, enabling them to make fast, data-driven decisions.

Communities also tend to be cost-effective, especially for high-output, high-impact research teams. One Rival customer recently shared that they run at least 400% more research projects with their insights community without the need for more budget. That's tangible ROI that both your CMO and CFO can get behind!

Potential Cons: Traditional management challenges

Delivering the best participant experience is key to the success of your insights community. After all, without people participating, you can't get the insights you need.

So the research experience must be pleasant, even fun, with interesting questions that help members understand their involvement's purpose and how they contribute to addressing business problems.

Mobile technologies and a conversational approach can help make the experience more frictionless and foster a genuine community. When used right, AI can also improve and accelerate various aspects of the insight community management, including analyzing sentiment and themes from your unstructured data.

Setup time for communities hasn't always been ideal. Because of old-school tactics like apps and portals, even some top insight community providers sometimes take several months to launch. We don't agree with this approach.

We designed our customer insights platform to enable a more lightweight approach to modern community management. This means no apps or portals. Branding your conversational surveys is fast and easy. And with the help of our customer success team, you can have your research roadmap ready and do your recruitment in just a couple of weeks.

Similarly, we usually recommend a more "common sense" approach to sharebacks, which are critical to keeping your members engaged. Instead of long email newsletters and PDFs, for example, we recommend incorporating your sharebacks within your conversational surveys themselves. For instance, your team could include a short video from one of your team members at the start of the survey. Or you can share a notable takeaway from your last activity before getting on with the rest of your survey. Sharebacks don't have to be complicated!

In short, community management is only a pain if you stick to old-school tactics. By thinking about the experience from your members' point of view - and considering carefully what makes sense given their current behaviors and expectations - you can have a thriving insights community.

Pros: Data quality and fraud minimization

There's a lot of discussions right now in the insights industry about data quality and fraud. This issue is particularly important as our industry adopts more AI products. After all, when it comes to AI, the quality of your outputs is just as good as your inputs.

In a world of bots and survey farms, a community gives you a unique opportunity to engage with trusted consumes you have vetted yourself. Again, a mobile-first approach can help here. For example, Community 2.0 uses SMS as the primary mode of communication. This adds an extra layer of verification because mobile numbers are harder to fake than email addresses.

When recruiting in the wild (beyond your own customer lists and CRM database), we can even ask for videos and photos in the profiling questionnaire or follow-up activities to help verify that each person is who they say they are.

If you're developing a real and meaningful relationship with your community members, the risk of fraud or human mistakes reduces. When they find the experience enjoyable, community members are less likely to do "straightlining" and race through the survey. With Community 2.0, we see an average of 87% completion rates thanks, to a conversational approach that feels more like talking to a friend than completing a test. This, in turn, leads to far greater depth of insight.

Potential Cons: Biases in insight communities

All types of research have potential for bias. Insight communities are not immune to these biases but there are ways to minimize them.

Self-selection bias occurs as members often choose to join, meaning they may not fully represent the broader target audience.

In branded insight communities, brand bias may also lead participants to provide overly positive feedback, glossing over critical areas for improvement. Some members may give responses they believe the company wants to hear, rather than offering genuine insights.

How to reduce bias in an insights community

As I mentioned, there are tangible steps you can take to minimize bias in an insight community. These include the following:

1. Aim for diverse recruitment.

Use a multi-channel approach to recruitment and aim to recruit a diverse mix of participants that reflects your target market or customer base. Pay attention to demographic diversity (age, gender, location), behavioral diversity (new vs. long-time customers), and psychographic diversity (preferences, attitudes). If you're a Rival customer, our customer success team will talk to you about your community composition on a quarterly basis to make sure that you have the right people.

2. Do a regular refresh.

Periodically refresh members in the community to bring in fresh perspectives and reduce the risk of participant "over-familiarity" with the brand. It's also a good idea to churn members who are not very engaged or those that are no longer relevant to your research needs.

3. Use varied engagement techniques.

Mix up activities by alternating between conversational surveys, discussions, video surveys, sharebacks, etc. This variety keeps members engaged and minimizes the chance of patterned or automatic responses.

4. Avoid over-incentivizing.

Incentives work because they are incentivizing, but if they are the only reason your community members are participating, then you may not get the best data quality. Ensure that incentives are fair but modest, encouraging genuine feedback rather than participation for material gain.

In most cases, a prize draw or sweepstakes will suffice. Simple works!

5. Encourage honest feedback.

From our experience, community members already tend to be honest in their responses, even in branded communities. People have opinions and they want to be heard.

That said, it won't hurt to remind your community members that you want to hear their unvarnished thoughts and feelings. Remind them that they can be honest as they want.

A mobile-first approach can also help drive more honest feedback: research from the Wharton School of Business found that people are more forthcoming when they are share via mobile instead of a PC. Asking for video feedback can also help because people naturally say more when they talk rather than when they type.

Pros: Enabling rapid action, activation and storytelling

The ultimate goal of any research is to drive actionable insights. If your stakeholders aren't using your recommendations, then what's the point?

This is why storytelling is important. And thankfully, your insights community can help with this as well.

You could position your insights community as an on-demand resource to capturing the authentic voice of the customer. Stakeholders from product, marketing, CX, UX and other departments can greatly benefit from having hearing from real customers.

Video feedback from your community can help provide additional emotions and context, but it can also be an effective storytelling tool. Some Rival customers often include video reels from their community when presenting their recommendations to the wider organization. When you show the faces of real customers, it just hits stakeholders differently!

Con: Not Ideal For Some Use Cases

Insights communities are flexible and work well for many research needs, but they aren't ideal for every situation. For instance, if you're trying to measure brand awareness or brand affinity, communities might not be the best choice. Members of a community usually already know your brand, which can make it hard to get an unbiased view. For the same reason, competitive intelligence may not be the best use case for insights communities.

If you only have a few research projects planned for the year, it might not make sense financially to have a research community. But if you do at least a couple of projects a month, the market research ROI of an insight community is hard to beat.

And while some communities can be very large (some brands have 10,000+ community members on the Rival platform, for example), communities aren't designed for research projects that require large, representative sample. Working with a panel might be better in those instances. Insights communities are ideal for ongoing conversations with specific important audiences, rather than one-off surveys from the general public.

Learn More About Insight Community Management

By considering both the benefits and challenges of insight communities, marketing and insights pros can make informed decisions on how to leverage this powerful tool. If you're already using a community, implementing modern community management techniques is key to maximizing the return of your investment.

Still wondering if an insight community is right for your team? Reach out to our experts to learn more or check out our webinar on insight community use cases to hear examples of how leading brands currently leverage this tool to elevate their research.

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