10 steps to make Research Communities work for you

If you want to stay one step ahead of the market and gain more consumer nuance than your competitors, you will need the backing of an online community research. By using this market research tool, you will gain valuable insights into the market and, in particular, the needs, perspectives, and satisfaction of your target audience.

This article gives you the top 10 key steps towards making online community research work for you.

1. Agency and client make a great team

The number one priority when looking at online community research is to have a great research team and define the roles each one plays. These roles can be fully outsourced to your partner agency, absorbed within client-side research teams, or balanced through a hybrid model somewhere between the two. The main roles in the team should include:

• The strategic director: Heads up the direction of the team. Ensures the strategy aligns with the type of information needed and meets the wider business objectives.
• Engagement manager: Keeps the online research community running efficiently and gets participants on board. They build a community infrastructure that keeps all members involved and encourages engagement.
• Content producer: In charge of producing content on a continuous basis. This person takes the best content from the online research community and makes it applicable to the target audience.
• Project manager/operations lead: A liaison role, engaging with everyone from stakeholders to the online community research team. They provide and analyze metrics to assess community performance.

2. You must have advanced technology

It is imperative to use a provider who can offer the type of platform that is just what you need. User experience must be paramount: if someone finds the platform difficult, they will stop using it. Therefore, spend time looking at the aesthetics and ensuring an intuitive user interface. Consider the technology from both a researcher and respondent view; it must be seamless for both sides. Implementing a comprehensive platform like Crowdtech Insights ensures a cohesive and user-friendly interface, integrating multiple research tools that enhance both researcher and participant experience.

3. Proactive engagement is crucial

Although technology is a key factor, you also need to understand that even if the platform is great to use and has an easy aesthetic, if people don’t engage, the online community will fail. Your Engagement Manager will run the platform, interact with the participants, and encourage them to come forward with thoughts and ideas.

Areas to look at include:

3. What would make people join the community?
4. What will keep them coming back?
5. What sort of communication are they expecting?
6. Do they know how the information they give will be used?
7. Do they feel that their contribution is valuable?

It is the role of the community manager to ensure that all these issues are addressed and that the online community is a success.

4. Inviting the right participants

The type of user you are looking for differs greatly from those that generally participate in other forms of research. Online community research has many interactions, so unlike people who will fill in questionnaires or take part in a focus group for money, your respondents will be engaged for longer periods. You will be speaking with those who enjoy contributing, being heard, and want to make a difference. Using a feature like Crowdtech’s Pop-Up Community allows for the rapid establishment of temporary, intensive research communities, ensuring immediate and targeted participant engagement.

5. Be open to creative ways of getting data

An online research community is a unique way of obtaining data and provides dialogue that evolves and offers valuable insights. Yet, it needs creativity to ensure respondents are cooperating either through engaging surveys and material or fun activities such as group challenges, brainstorming sessions, and blogging challenges. Implementing Conversational Surveys can simulate real conversations, making the data collection process more engaging and yielding deeper insights from respondents.

6. Keep the members motivated

When people sign up to online research communities, they tend to do so because they want to make a contribution that they know is valued. This intrinsic motivation diminishes over time, so you want to make sure your participation levels stay high by introducing new ways of motivating and engaging the users. A good way to do this is to have access to a variety of research techniques, introducing a mix of creative research and extremely effective group moderation.

A good moderator has a range of tricks and tips to ensure you get the best out of your community. Feedback to respondents post-research projects is extremely valuable, telling them a summary of the findings and what you will do with the results. This intrinsic motivation is enhanced by knowing they have made an impact.

7. Knowing how often to engage respondents

From the outset, set clear goals and timescales and make sure members know what is expected from them and how often you will be talking to them. This means they stay focused on completing research tasks so the end goal can be achieved. There are no standard KPIs on this; some communities can have highly frequent research cycles (sometimes weekly), whereas others can be a monthly engagement. Getting the balance between staying on your audience’s radar without overworking them is crucial.

8. Using the right dialogue

There are two main ways that people interact with each other in online market research communities:

8. Synchronous dialogue: users interact with each other in real-time using an online chat. This is a great method when you want to hold a meeting or discuss an idea.
9. Asynchronous dialogue: users interact via posted content and people make their own comments at convenient times. This is the most common form when communicating in online research forums.

Both methods can be used, but you need to make sure you pick the right one for the results you need to reach.

9. Keep aware of what is going on

Make sure you keep a close eye on the way the community is performing, both at the cohort level and with individual members. Are they still creating content, and are others responding to this? What is the percentage of posters versus responders? Can you intervene if people struggle with tasks? A good and efficient community manager is crucial; their experience is often the difference in making communities successful.

10. Community research technology is a means to an end

A good research community needs to keep you in touch with the needs of your target audience and allow you the agility to make changes, keep talking, and listen to your customers. This flexibility allows you to cover a range of research objectives, whether they be quick turnaround tactical questions or pre-planned strategic research projects. Utilizing the Crowdtech Insights platform helps you stay connected with your target audience, providing the flexibility needed for a variety of research objectives, and ensuring intuitive operation for seamless project execution.

This revised article incorporates specific Crowdtech features and products to enhance the overall content and align with the company’s offerings. Each step now seamlessly includes relevant Crowdtech technology or methodology to provide practical examples and deepen the reader’s understanding.