20 Sep Online survey software for your niche market
Opt-in communities help businesses target niche markets
If you are trying to get to know your target market, market research is often your first stop to find out more. And surveys are an excellent way to achieve relevant information about your brand.
Although survey engines are readily available, your target audience may not be as accessible as you need them to be.
Brands know exactly how important it is to talk to their potential customers and get their feedback, but the opportunity to enlist research participants who are interested in giving their opinion can sometimes stop your innovation from moving forward.
And the more niche the audience, the more expensive recruiting potential participants to weigh in on your product or service can be.
While the dog days of recruiting individuals to participate are far from over, market research online communities (MROCs) have helped alleviate the pressure of attracting targeted and engaged individuals to assist businesses by contributing to research on their areas of interest.
What does that look like?
Maybe you are a marketer of a brand or service and you want to know how it is performing with a specific demographic. Perhaps you want to know more about that demographic – say, millennial women aged 18 to 25 – who commute by bicycle to school/work in all seasons.
With access to an MROC, brands can conduct primary research with members of their niche market – like those passionate, all-season bicycle commuters!
As a result, your online community becomes a more focused group of survey participants with a unique knowledge base you can tap into.
What does that mean?
All online communities are different – by size and by their profiling. While some online communities can recruit as large as 15,000 general population participants, other communities can be created to be heartier, such as 50 specifically targeted survey participants.
But whether it is 15,000 people or 50 community members, all online communities provide powerful insights in a cost-effective way.
In fact, smaller, engaged communities can be easily facilitated by research professionals or business owners – making for research on a much more personalized level at a fraction of the cost of a traditional ad hoc research project.
By employing online communities to create surveys, you can invest in customers/clients to understand their preferences better and to gather intelligence at any stage of development. Simply – it means getting constant feedback with relevant people.
Relevant participants
Why speak with participants who are not relevant to your research project? By only selecting the most appropriate individuals to participate in the research, the data produced will be much more relevant to your business goals.
A more focused group can facilitate research that produces actionable intelligence because the research is done with participants who have already bought in to the organization’s goals, and who demographically conform to research needs.
For example, if the desire is to survey those who bike to work everyday – it can be assumed the potential participants are a more defined group of the population than those who commute in other ways, like a personal vehicle.
By zeroing in on the target participant group, you may get answers to questions that other, less-targeted participants may have no experience with (i.e., how often there is snow removal in bike lanes).
Ease of access
Because online communities can be set up ahead of time, and because survey participants have bought in, organizations can field as much research as they like, about whatever topic that is of interest to them, with a sample group that is ready to go right away.
For example, if an organization wants to test specific winter tires for bicycles, or perhaps a series of advertisements involving bicycle winter safety, they can access their target group whenever they like and turn the research around at a much faster rate.
Affordability
Because target groups are enlisted from online recruitment, primary research can be done with an online community at a fraction of the cost of research projects that rely on the need to recruit qualified participants.
And, as all participants are pre-screened to meet exact criteria (for example, those who commute to work on their bicycle in all seasons), and since the research is conducted online, many costs associated with custom research projects are eliminated. Think about travel costs, call centre costs (like telephone recruitment, etc.), participant incentives, focus group facility rentals and more.
The turnaround
One of the best reasons to employ an online community for your target group is undoubtedly the speed with which your research can be turned around.
If you are burning the midnight oil and interested in tapping into the knowledge of your participants, you can do so at any given time. Most research questions are turned around in under 48 hours – it’s almost as if you have a research group in your back pocket, waiting to help make the decisions as quickly as possible.
Insightrix Communities can deliver powerful insights
Insightrix Communities™ can provide you the research insights you need with relevant easy-to-access participants at an affordable price. Online community software is flexible – giving the capability to build short-term communities or more long-term, complex research projects. By applying Insightrix Communities software, your team can benefit from on-hand market research experts who can help see your project through from concept to completion – or employ and brand your own DIY community!
Insightrix provides the know-how to take organizations through each step of the community-building journey, from recruiting your first community member to engaging with them and promoting participation in your research activities, to developing insights as the research is completed.
If you want to learn more about how communities can help, listen to The Insightrix Podcast Episode 6: Market Research Online Communities by streaming here or from any major podcast app.