3 Key Characteristics of a Cutting-Edge Insight Community Platform

Insight communities are an ideal way to gather intel and insight into the minds of your brand’s target audience. Today’s best-in-class insight community platforms are more powerful than ever, leveraging top-of-the-line analytics technology to help you make faster, better decisions. Unfortunately, not all insight community platforms keep up with the times. Here are 3 defining characteristics to look for in any insight community platform you evaluate.

1. It Allows for Unlimited Audience Segmentation with Dynamic Personalization

Today’s leading-edge insight community platforms help every diverse opinion get the platform it deserves. For many years, insights communities provided a one-size-fits-all experience for community members. Tools to segment and target market research within the community were limited or non-existent, and you often had to set up a second, separate insight community if you wanted to do research with multiple, unique segments. Today’s best solutions move past these constraints, allowing you to include as many audience segments as you want – all in one community. You can even create new segments on the fly. For example, you might want to take a group that had “top box” purchase intent for an important new product concept and recontact them later for a home use test. The very best insight community platforms even allow you to reskin the look at feel of the community based on the segment they are in. For example, you could have both branded and unbranded instances of the community running at the same time, with the branded graphics showing for brand users and the unbranded graphics showing for prospects. This functionality makes it easy to personalize an insight community experience across an entire range of brand engagement for active, lapsed, and even potential customers. With this diversity, you access more perspectives and generate better ideas.

2. The Longer Its Up the Smarter it Gets

Most of the time spent on research-based decision-making is wasted on the wait for results. Combined with employee turnover, rotations, promotions and constant re-orgs, many large companies end up re-fielding some of the same studies year after year, not realizing that the data they need already exists – it’s just trapped in an outdated insights community platform. Leading edge insight community platforms have rich profiling capabilities with respondent profiles that build depth and texture over time. As you field more and more research, you can even perform data mining across existing studies to find answers to pressing questions without needing to field new research. The best insight community platforms also have smart tagging features that allow you to search and filter by keywords you can enter for each project. In the hands of an experienced partner with deep expertise in insights communities, they can become the new, centralized data hub for business decisions.

3. It Breaks the Wall Between Quant and Qual

Cutting-edge Insight communities erase the age-old wall dividing quant and qual to bring holistic research programs together in one cohesive market research solution that drives toward agile answers across BOTH exploration and validation. With one powerful tool in the hands of one, skilled full-service insights community provider team, you can nail the headlines AND the details.

Your insight community platform should offer  a variety of quantitative and qualitative market research tools native within the platform including:

• Semantic differential
• MaxDiff analysis
• Van Westendorp pricing analysis
• Image heat mapping and hotspots
• Longitudinal customer journey tracking
• Discussion boards
• Live and screen-recorded UI/UX research on desktop and mobile
• “Swipe right” style concept screening
• Whiteboarding
• Image annotation
• Video annotation
• Video uploads
• Emoji scales
• And so much more

This plethora of research methodologies allows you to gain a deeper understanding of your target audience from every angle and develop an ongoing competitive advantage in your industry. Not sure if your insights community solution checks these important boxes? Check out our blog that covers 10 signs it’s time to upgrade your insights community.

FinchSight is Designed to Take You Further, Faster

At Finch Brands, we created the insights community solution we wished we had when our leaders were clients of leading insights community providers. From the ground up, we identified all the shortcomings that frustrated us across insights community partner teams and technology to build a solution that raises the bar in the industry.

Contact us today for more information about our insight community and other essential brand consulting services.