A Flexible Solution to Understanding Today's Ongoing Conversations

With all this chatter, finding a way to not only understand the conversation but to also participate in it while gathering the right actionable insights is becoming more and more important. Within the research industry, online Communities have become one of the leading qualitative tools to engage your members in a continuous conversation about their opinions, their objectives, the brands they use and more. They provide dynamic, online environments for ongoing member-to-member interaction through quantitative and most importantly ongoing qualitative activities.

However, a challenge for companies today, is that in this demanding world of tight budgets, a push for fast insights and busy work days, there's a high demand for even greater flexibility in research solutions. Companies want the ease of being able to execute simple to complex studies to meet their quantitative needs and they want the ability to probe for the insights--but only when they need to, not on an ongoing basis. Many businesses just aren't ready or don't need to delve into the constant conversation, but they want to be able to listen and participate when the need arises.

The great news is that there is a flexible alternative to communities: custom panels with ad hoc qualitative capabilities.

With Custom Panels, you can conduct regular surveying of your target audience and add point-in time qualitative research activities when needed. This allows you to achieve the flexibility and long-term longitudinal analysis not available through ad hoc quantitative research, while also gaining the insights needed to understand how your target relates to your brand, products, services and more through intermittent, on-tap conversations. So you can still tap into your important customers or target market for the insights needed to understand the current conversations your customers are having about you.

Beyond the benefit of a custom panel being flexible and providing you with the ability to conduct a range of simple to complex quantitative studies or focus in on intimate conversations between smaller groups of members when needed, they are also cost effective. Panels provide a simplified way to collect insights without breaking your research budget, in comparison to the time and money it often takes to send out ad-hoc surveys and questionnaires or invest in the ongoing engagement needed to maintain a community.

Many of the same benefits of a full community can be achieved in a Panel:

Continuous access: unlike an access panel, custom panels provide you with ongoing access - on your schedule - to your specially defined target groups to attain a deeper understanding of your audience.

Longitudinal learning: you can learn from your target market over time and create a one-on-one dialogue with them over many studies to understand how and why they make the decisions they do.

Respondent-friendly surveys: since you have continuous access to members, this also means surveys can be shorter and more relevant to each member, increasing response rates and retention.

Faster research results: panels provide a nimble tool to access insights, with the ability to field research, pull results, and generate actionable learnings in a matter of days instead of weeks.

Scalable: your panel can morph over time to meet your company's needs--grow it in size, add or change segments, add subpanels, add or change the target audience and branding.

On-tap and real-time access: panels are a 24/7 resource, always on, always ready, providing immediate access to your audience to track quantitative and qualitative feedback.

Three Keys to a Successful Custom Panel with Ad Hoc Qual

Once you've made a decision to try a custom panel, it's imperative that you set yourself up for success. Too often we see panels start up where the vision exceeds the reality or the right elements aren't in place to prevent the panel from failing. There are three keys to a successful panel that we've observed; securing the right buy-in, making sure you truly have access to the right potential members for your panel, and ensuring you run the right research for both you and your members.

Before building a custom panel, it's important that the right stakeholders in your organization are on board to help you secure the right level of buy-in, not only concerning the objectives of the panel, but also with the commitment to ensuring there is ongoing content to provide to the members.

It's imperative that not only the research team, but also other relevant teams--like marketing, social listening, and product development--have a stake in the panel to ensure consistent and relevant usage. Without the right internal buy-in, your panel is typically set-up to fail.

Once you've achieved buy-in, the next step is to ensure you have access to the best potential members for your panel. There are many ways to recruit to a panel. You can use your own internal email lists if available, vendors can provide panel purchase member lists, and many companies are recruiting through social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. The key is ensuring that the source you're using has the required potential number of qualified members to meet your panel needs.

When you've recruited the right sample to your panel, you want to ensure you keep them. Running the wrong research for your members, even if it meets your needs will lead to deep attrition. If you run the right research it goes a long way to keeping the members engaged and wanting to participate in the conversation.

A custom panel allows you to achieve a longitudinal view of your members. It's also an opportunity to build on your brand experience while gaining the key insights needed to drive your business decision needs. It's important to keep in mind though that the members aren't just research participants. They are people, and they have joined your panel to be heard and participate in something that can drive change.

If you don't treat your members well, you'll lose them. Treating them well includes ensuring the research you are running on the platform meets not only your needs, but the members' expectation.

In order to avoid participant fatigue and frustration, surveys shouldn't be more than 10 minutes long unless the right expectations are set around length of survey and accompanied by the right incentives.

You also want to ensure that your research is relevant to your target audience. With the ability to sample in custom panels, you can easily send targeted surveys to only the portion of the members for whom the topic is applicable.

Also don't ask for information you've already collected unless you need to update your data. People remember what information they've provided and if you're asking them for their data more than once, they may decide they're not being heard and choose not to participate again.

When running qualitative activities, it's equally important to ensure you're speaking to the right group to gain the right insights. It's also important to ensure you are using the qualitative tool for the right reasons. Do you need answers to questions you didn't ask in your surveys? Or do you want to supplement a survey with qualitative insights to build on your understanding of the member's motivators? Do you want to do more listening then driving the direction of the overall discussion? These are key times when running an online discussion is a good idea.

If you follow these keys to success as you set up a custom panel with ad hoc qual, you'll ensure that you have a flexible solution with the right target market, the right content and the right research to drive your panel to success. You'll be in a great position to start gaining the insights needed from the conversation-filled-world we live in as you'll be able to hear from the right people what you need to know to make informed decisions and deliver great results. It's key to remember that while there are many benefits to running a custom panel, but like any research tool, it's meant to fill a specific need in your research tool kit.