Online research communities help you to stay connected with like-minded people. They keep you engaged with potential prospects and customers. you can get spontaneous and real-time insights from the audience you want to target to convey to them any updates about your abrupt marketing, product or operational decisions. By bringing closer high focused qualitative studies or analysis, and bigger, more structurally organized quantitative research studies, advisory boards and online communities can analyze broader and complex topics over a while and answer questions at a short notice. This provides a space for healthy constructive discussions, innovation exercises and co-creation before finally making an entrance in the market.
Types of Online Community Platform
This time is important to consider that online research communities are broadly divided into three types. Although each of these communities is independently based on their separate set goals, we can’t say that they are mutually exclusive. They often have more than just one main objective.
These communities are described below:
Project-Based Communities
These communities are long term investments for research. They empower the researchers to run and handle ongoing research insights. The projects may include bulletin boards, focus groups, image and video tasks, dairies or particular forum discussions. They allow researchers to pick and choose within the community and have to go through the hassle of recruitment from external sources. This however requires constant focus and management to keep engagement active.
Listening Communities
These communities empower the participants, unlike project-based communities. The goal of these communities is to enable the members to lead discussions and conversations and understand organically arising themes in a better way. For this purpose, the researchers don’t set project rules or agendas but rather provide a platform for people to have discussions about things that matter to them and are of more interest to them. Also Read – Growth Sectors for Investors to Consider in 2021
Pop-up Communities
These communities are run on short term projects, probably for 3 months or less. These are designed to compile abundant qualitative data into a single theme. Mostly these communities are subgroups of a larger research group but they can also exist independently.
Benefits of Joining an Online Research Community
There are several advantages of joining an online research community platform. Read below to know the 6 most beneficial aspects of them:
- It is an ideal platform to closely and directly interact with your potential customers. It brings similar ideas and people together which can help develop your brand. While people discuss the brand you can get useful suggestions to improve your brand. It is the common consumer that helps you analyze and just your product and not the high-class executives.
- You can produce brand ambassadors. After all, word of mouth is what greatly matters. People can share their reviews and experiences related to your brand or product.
- It can help you increase the credibility of your brand and customer loyalty. The more positive remarks you’ll be, the more trusted your label will be.
- These platforms help to amalgamate both qualitative and quantitative aspects of your project. You can get an overall view of your standing and an in-depth analysis of each aspect of your project.
- While interacting with your audience you can get a better idea of what the customer expectations are and you can steer in the right direction to meet them. By being directly in contact with your consumers you can get any problems and provide solutions on time.
- Being a part of these communities can save you money. Instead of relying on external sources, you can take assistance from the participants anytime. Even if you require additional research you can get that help without having to invest again.