Use Online Communities For Strategic Insight

Community input offers marketers an intimate — and continuous — understanding of brands, but only if you're willing to listen closely to what members have to say. If you're ready to improve your brand strategy using community insights, partner with market research first. Then decide which objective to pursue, whether to keep membership restricted or open, and whether to recruit customers or prospects. You can use feedback to uncover what consumers really want or to design new products and marketing programs. The key is to get your research team to focus on what's important in a sea of open-ended responses: insights that matter to your marketing plans. Research communities will redefine marketing planning, making agency relationships more complicated.