What are Insight Communities good for?

So we know what an Insight Community is, but how can we use them to maximum effect? What are the benefits, use cases, and outcomes of a high-quality and well-run Insight Community solution?

Truly understand customers

Today’s customers are more powerful than ever. There is so much information at their fingertips in the form of product reviews and price comparisons. Not only that but they have a global choice of brands to buy from. If you want to win their loyalty, you need to understand and pivot to their changing needs.

Keeping customers happy

  • Dig deeper into customer feedback to better understand your Net Promoter Score.
  • Use your community to identify problems, their impact, and test different solutions.
  • Find out how customers really feel about you, your competition and what brings them into the category.

The bigger picture

  • Rapidly analyse the health of your community and sentiment on specific topics.
  • Discussion forums unlock emerging trends and topics.
  • Implicit response testing helps you understand the ever-changing landscape of customer expectations.

Real customer experiences

  • Diary studies can highlight real buying habits, customer interactions and consumption.
  • Capture in-the-moment feedback from assisted shopping trips.
  • Collaborative video workshops, no matter where your customers may be.

Download now

Fine-tune your brand & comms

Your brand lives in the hearts and minds of your customers. Brand consistency is difficult in a world where technology and trends change rapidly. Dig deeper into how customers truly see you and what they really want and adapt your brand, comms & campaigns without losing core values.

Brand positioning

  • Unlock the emotional connection between your brand and your audience with implicit associations.
  • Dig deeper into your brand elements using image association and metaphor tasks.
  • Guided journeys through emotional and sensory brand connections.

Brand development

  • Explore the impact of removing or adding to your product range to understand your brand architecture.
  • Understand which channels will have the maximum impact, what media your target market actively consumes, which cultural moments are they talking about?
  • Great brands grow and change with their audience and what better way to do this by having their voice at the core?

Refine your creative

  • Discuss ideas and review creative with online qualitative focus groups.
  • Dig deeper into video creative through dial tests, eye tracking and facial coding.
  • Text highlighter analysis for print, advertising and web copy.

Innovate & create

It’s a jungle out there. With new competition and new products popping up, it’s never been harder to get in front of customers. Anything new is always risky. Quickly learn what works and what doesn’t by using continual feedback loops to ensure insight is embedded at every step of the innovation process.

Generate new ideas

  • Use co-creation workshops and collaborative tools to generate new ideas, test out concepts and validate your campaigns.
  • Discover the appeal and importance of different features in your new product or service using max diff questions.
  • Unstructured discussion forums can help you find trends, topics and talking points you might not have considered.

Eye-catching Designs

  • Augmented reality lets customers view designs through their device. How would that new sofa look in their living room?
  • Highlighter and annotation lets you understand what is standing out and why.
  • What’s really drawing the audience and how do they feel about it? Use eye tracking technology with sentiment analysis to find out.

Perfect your pricing

  • Find out how consumers value different product attributes so you can mix and match the best combo by using conjoint analysis.
  • Unpick price preferences to identify a range of acceptable price points using Van Westendorp techniques.
  • Use Gabor Granger to determine demand curves and the ideal price for a new product or service.

How your department benefits

Management:

Every brand wants to become more agile and seize opportunities. By consulting your customers you can quickly sense-check your course of action and share amongst your team. We’ve designed our solutions for lightning-quick turnaround with stakeholder engagement and internal dashboards built in.

Sales:

Knowledge is power and by integrating an Insight Community with a CRM, you’ll get a holistic view of the whole customer journey. What’s more by segmenting your target audience within the platform you can have a better idea of the
motivations, pain points and messaging that will wow your prospects.

Marketing:

Whether you want to understand how memorable your branding is or how your audience will react to your upcoming advert, you can supercharge your certainty by involving customers. Our platform, ex-plor includes a wide range of features including forums, surveys, heatmaps, scales, ratings, shelf tests, video sessions and more.

Research & Development:

Whether it’s an initial idea or product optimisation, your customers can help you to fine-tune new ideas or innovations. One community can house several different segments allowing you to drill down into the impact that your proposals will have.

Human Resources:

From feedback programmes to satisfaction tracking or even as a platform for training, an Insight Community can help to develop and retain your key players.

It’s important to stress that the same Insight Community wouldn’t necessarily be used for everything we’ve talked about here. Insight Communities are extremely flexible tools, but they can’t do everything ‘off the shelf’. The objectives
of each community will lend themselves to different set-up, design and duration options.

Sector-by-sector use cases

Retail & FMCG

Key trends

Retail is still struggling to balance online portals with high street presence. Disruption comes in the form of new on-demand services in the convenience market. Brands need to leverage the database of today to futureproof their business for tomorrow.

Tactical/short-term

  • Maximise marketing: discover the most effective messaging and measure comms impact.
  • Win online: Optimise online experiences and omnichannel journeys.
  • Innovate easily: Develop and refine new products, new ideas and new campaigns.

Strategic/long-term

  • Personalisation: One community can house many segments for ongoing research.
  • Growth areas: Uncover new opportunities, product extensions and target markets.
  • Strategy: Supercharge your certainty by involving customers in your key decisions.

Media & Publishing

Key trends

Viewers are thirsty for high-quality content, but every greenlit script is a gamble and there are no certainties. Media firms need to validate their content investment, refine their offering and subscription levels whilst serving up greater personalised recommendation and ad choices.

Tactical/short-term

  • Test & tweak: Develop and refine your content with a wide range of tools.
  • Price is right: Find the right balance between freemium, subscription and premium models.
  • Erase campaign pain: Understand reactions to your campaign, track and evidence performance and uplift.

Strategic/long-term

  • Cultural insight: Understand how cultural, societal, and other macro factors are influencing audiences.
  • Get on trend: Get ahead of the curve through active listening and easy analysis.
  • Competitor know-how: Map out your share of wallet and where your proposition sits in the market.

Financial Services

Key trends

Developments in fin-tech and open banking are transforming the way we spend, save and invest. Consumers expect financial institutions to be transparent, ethical and flexible to their needs. It’s never been more important to dig deep into the needs of consumers, deliver a seamless omnichannel experience and win their loyalty.

Tactical/short-term

  • Develop your digital: Improve user experience and discover real journeys and problems.
  • White space: Easily incorporate feedback throughout the innovation cycle.
  • Segment to success: You can easily house several segments within one community meaning ongoing research and insight as their needs change.

Strategic/long-term

  • Regulation: Ensure a customer-led strategy and response to regulatory changes.
  • Concept testing: Develop and test new offerings through concept testing.
  • Usage & attitudes: Who should you target, what drives their purchase and how can you reach them?

Technology

Key trends

Regulation is increasing. Issues around security and privacy are here to stay. While tech companies have seen big gains recently, investors are now taking a more cautious outlook. So how can tech companies ensure ROI on their activity?

Tactical/short-term

  • Real journeys: Unlock real usage of websites and apps with mouse and click tracking.
  • Compelling creative: From early-stage concepts through to completed creative, get real feedback and analysis on your collateral.
  • Co-creation: Develop and refine new ideas, new features and new products with the very people who’ll be using them.

Strategic/long-term

  • Drive purchases: Compare and contrast different offerings and packages, understand the key points in the customer journey and convert more users.
  • Improve engagement: Serve users more of what they love by tapping into the wider cultural conversation.
  • Understand your users: Segments sit easily within the platform enabling testing with different groups.

Travel & Leisure

Key trends

Travel was a growing sector before the pandemic hit as new destinations and new innovations opened up cheaper flights for more people. Now every travel brand is battling it out to win over cautious customers. They need to optimise every step from booking and travel to in-resort and attraction experiences.

Tactical/short-term

  • Land your message: Test your comms to ensure they align with customer needs and drive brand ‘fame’ and consideration.
  • Clear channels: Understand omnichannel booking journeys and where you can have influence.
  • Real journeys: Gain ‘in the moment’ or post trip feedback, to understand booking, travel and trip experiences.

Strategic/long-term

  • A single view: Have one platform incorporating CRM, loyalty card and third-party data.
  • Delve deeper: Understand menu choices, packages and experiences and see what travellers are willing to pay that little bit more for.
  • Personalisation: Use segments in your community and test personalised messages, offers and packages.

This article is an excerpt from our series of 3 ebooks around insight communities. Download now to receive:

  1. Why every brand needs an Insight Community

  2. 10 steps to creating and running the very best insight community

  3. Turning your Insight Community into a strategic asset

Download now

Want to find out more?

Get in touch