Today’s leading organizations are increasingly employing agile approaches to developing new marketing programs, product or service innovations and customer experiences. By leveraging agile market research methods, your organization is able to simultaneously design, test and build new solutions before going to market. This approach speeds time to market, while still ensuring your go-to-market strategy fits with consumers’ lifestyles, situations and needs.
Our monthly blog post offers practical tips and advice on how to implement agile research. December's agile tips focus on the ways in which you can build iteration within your research and are provided by Amy Elkes, an independent marketing consultant and one of Digsite's expert consultants.
Tip 1. Team Iteration Work Session
When you're designing your research study, consider how to build and learn simultaneously. If you schedule time during your research for your team to gather and review initial results, you can quickly build or revise stimuli to share back with research participants. This approach offers the value of two phases of research built into one. Agile research platforms like Digsite have instant reporting to collect and share key charts, quotes, photos and video. Iteration Work Sessions help teams move faster and reduce rework later in the development cycle.
Tip 2. Co-Create with Dynamic Voting
Sometimes the best way to optimize that list of features you are building (or benefits, varieties, solutions etc.) is to diverge with consumers before having them respond to your list. For example, ask them to share an example of a product feature they wish they had. Then pick any that complement your list and add them to a voting activity where participants can pick the most important among a broader set of solutions.
Tools like Digsite help you do this automatically, so you can determine how early ideas stack-up in consumers’ overall priority list.
Tip 3. Use Likes to Build on Responses
One way to incorporate iteration into your research is to have participants post responses privately, and then have them to view others responses and "like" and comment their favorites. While one person’s experience might not have been top of mind for others, encouraging “likes” and comments helps you get a more accurate view of consumers shared beliefs and experiences, as well as unique experiences that others might be interested in.
Tip 4. Iterate with Live Video Interviews
When you're conducting a study with a larger group online, it can sometimes be helpful to dive deeper into a subset that has a problem or need that is of particular interest. Scheduling a live video interview is one fast and easy for you to dive deeper with a sub-set of consumers. With Digsite, you can schedule follow-up video interviews, often in just 24 hours, to get meaningful insights among a narrower target.
To learn more about how your organization can make the move to agile research, here are some resources to check out:
- Agile Research Guide: How Teams Can Innovate Faster
- How to Build an Effective Agile Research Team
- How Leading CPG Companies Use Online Qualitative Research for Better Business Outcomes
