Pop-up communities are an online space that your customers can join to share their feedback directly with your brand. These are typically used on a short-term basis as a way of sharing research activities and for gaining insight about your customers’ views, experiences and preferences. As an example, these can be used when developing new concepts, such as advertising messages, as you can dip into your community to test different stimuli.
In the first of a two part series, Charlotte Evans provides a brief overview of what a pop-up community is – in addition to highlighting where and how such research methods are best deployed.
The video covers a number of the key features that define a pop-up community, in addition to the core benefits that researchers can gain from the method. Common, but not defining, traits such as incentivisation and social hierarchies are also touched upon. In part two of the series, Charlotte will explain the process of setting up a pop-up community within the InsightHub platform and the key steps to consider.
As pop-up communities are quick to set up and help rich insight to be gained, they are ideal for reaching your customers that are geographically dispersed. By keeping activities online, you can quickly reach key customer groups by simply sending them an invitation for them to join in and begin taking part. As the research is done remotely it give participants the flexibility that they can take part at a time and place that suits them.
Another example of how these can be used is during in-store experiments where your customers can access their community activities whenever they visit your stores and simply share their contributions while on-the-go.
By incentivizing activities with financial rewards or a point based system, pop-up communities create opportunities for high levels of activity engagement. This can help your brand to hear perspectives from a large number of customers and therefore enable all angles of opinions to be captured. As a final example, high engagement can be leveraged when using activities, such as polls and surveys, because the quantitative data obtained can show significant differences in your customers’ experiences.
The Online Research Hints and Tips series is designed to provide quick, easy-to-digest and actionable advice to help you make the most out of online qualitative and quantitative efforts. Tackling topics that range from participant communication to database management, getting the most out of focus groups to engagement strategies - we're aiming to make the world of online research easier for everyone to understand.