1. Exploration

If you’re looking to get a deeper understanding of your users and customers, an insight community is a great option. Over time, you can build a level of trust and enthusiasm with community participants that can be difficult to achieve with ad hoc projects. People are more likely to share personal details about their behaviour and usage when they feel comfortable and invested in the community. As a result, an insight community can be an invaluable tool for gaining insights into your target market.

2. Innovation and new product development

For ideation and co-creation, groups of engaged, knowledgeable users are fantastic resource. They can help you generate, develop and refine fresh ideas.

They can also help you identify white space, find opportunities for brand extensions or pick up on emergent competitors that weren’t on your radar.

You can also use larger communities to test concepts and validate ideas quantitatively – but again, be careful with your sample bias. Remember who your members are, and don’t assume you have a good proxy for the total market.

3. Communications development and testing

Before finalizing a campaign or advertisement, it is important to test the messaging quantitatively. This will help ensure that the final product is effective and resonates with the intended audience. Communities can be a great asset in this process, as they can provide feedback on both new and existing ideas. However, it is important to be careful when testing ads quantitatively, as too much focus on numbers can lead to losing sight of the bigger picture. By taking the time to develop and test communications effectively, businesses can ensure that their message is clear, concise, and appealing to their target consumers.

4. User & product research

User research is essential for understanding how people interact with your product and what their needs are. Insight communities can be a valuable tool for conducting user research, as they provide a platform for engaging with users and soliciting feedback. Additionally, if your community is integrated with your CRM platform, you can use event triggers or usage data to sample specific target groups. Having an engaged group of users is useful for design and usability testing, as well as for understanding how people use your product and what their needs are. By conducting user research through an insight community, you can gain valuable insights that will help you improve your product.

5. Customer experience development

Understanding and enhancing the customer experience often involves piecing together disparate behaviours, channels and data sources.

This is where the continuous nature of insight communities helps: longer-term research projects can get rich feedback from members as they go through a wide range of touch-points (in-store, call centre, online etc).

This helps build up much richer, composite pictures across whole experience and can add depth the metrics-driven approach of Voice-of-Customer and NPS tracking data. 

In short, insights communities offer a wide range of benefits to researchers and product teams. Our MySayToday’s Client Insights platform provides the necessary tools for you to manage your community, as well as harness the collective intelligence of its members. We encourage you to explore our platform and see how it can help support your research endeavors – from exploration and innovation to customer experience development. Start your free trial today or sign up to get started!