Picture this: instead of chasing down participants every time you need quick consumer insights, you have a readily accessible, dedicated group eager to share feedback whenever you need it.
Sounds like a dream, right? That’s exactly the promise (and reality) of Market Research Online Communities or MROCs for short.
In the fast-paced world of market research, insights professionals, CX leaders, and business strategists alike know the value of real-time feedback.
MROCs provide just that—an ongoing conversation with your target customers, enabling continuous and agile decision-making.
In this post, I’ll guide you through exactly what MROCs are, how they function, ways to use them effectively, their biggest benefits and common pitfalls, and share a real-world example to illustrate their impact.
An MROC is essentially a private online space, typically invitation-only, composed of carefully selected participants who engage with a brand, researcher, or moderator over time. Think of it as your own online focus group—always-on and always accessible.
But unlike one-off focus groups or surveys, these communities foster long-term engagement, building deeper, richer insights from a pool of genuinely committed participants.
Participants are recruited based on specific demographics, behaviors, or attitudes relevant to your research objectives. Once onboarded, members interact regularly through various activities such as discussion threads, surveys, polls, or even multimedia tasks like sharing photos or videos.
For example, our market research company has built online communities with audiences like gamers and influencers. We first find potential participants, validate that they are qualified, and get them signed up for the MROC. Then, when the client is ready to execute their next research study, we can quickly tap into the evolving opinions and behaviors of their target demographic, providing invaluable real-time insights.
There’s plenty of online market research communities that exist in the digital space. But while they all share the same premise, the type of platform as well as the people involved can vary.
Below are a few examples of the different types of communities that exist within the research space.
Some companies have become so deeply invested into the research space that they have created their own online communities.
This method usually focuses on gathering feedback on products or services from respondents that businesses have confidence in both the respondent quality and the respondents’ interest in their organization and its services.
Businesses can leverage an already existing social media following to gather feedback from users.
These communities may include brand pages, websites, or other social media groups to encourage users to share their feedback and experiences. A benefit with this method is that feedback may be easier to gather since users are already familiar with said brand’s offerings.
These communities are specifically designed to have participants engage in online focus groups.
Respondents in these groups are usually heavily vetted to confirm their qualifications. Activities in these groups include live video conferences with other participants and live chats led by a moderator.
There are plenty of unique benefits that online market research communities provide when compared to both traditional qualitative research methods.
Participants are incentivized to provide their honest feedback. In doing this, participants will communicate more openly and get a good dialogue going.
This leads to higher engagement numbers and respondent rates for niche target audiences.
Some community platforms have the capability to integrate live discussions with respondents.
This allows both researchers and businesses to gain immediate feedback and engage in a real-time conversation about the research and topics being addressed. A key benefit here is that smaller details are likely to come up naturally in the conversation.
Online market research communities offer many different types of research options that can be curated to best fit your organization’s needs.
Traditional surveys can be utilized as well as research formatted through online forums and message boards. This type of flexible research is important, as it provides more options to businesses across industries.
If you are looking for feedback from specific demographic groups, online communities have the capability to target based on your research needs.
Using segmentation, these communities can provide accurate information on various groups of people to help businesses target specific audiences. By using this information, brands can tailor their products/services to their customers.
Online market research communities are able to provide your business with pre-existing respondent bases.
With a community of respondents already available to fulfill your research, the process of spending days or even weeks looking for those qualified to respond to your research needs is completely eliminated.
The only timing that is left up to you is how quickly you want to get your research prepared and sent out into the field.
Having an already prepared online research community eliminates the need for qualitative research measures like in-person focus groups.
In-person qualitative research can increase research budgets, so reducing the need for them can help your organization shift the budget into other marketing strategies or even additional research.
While there are plenty of benefits to online research communities, there are a few drawbacks.
Like any other research method, the initial recruitment of participants can turn into a challenge, especially when targeting a niche audience.
Audiences can also have varying preferences to the types of research they are interested in participating in, so personal preferences may reduce response rates or eliminate members from community participation altogether.
Online market research communities can be curated by either a moderator from the business conducting research or a researcher who is partnered with that business.
The responsibility of selecting participants has the possibility of being biased by those making the selection. Extra care must be taken in order to limit the amount of bias in the selection process.
In some instances with these online communities, personal identifying information (PII) can be used to validate the quality of respondents.
As is the case with any other type of data collection, the privacy of your users should be paramount during the entire process.
Ready to unlock a continuous stream of customer insights? We can help you design, launch, and manage a successful market research online community that fits your goals—and your budget.
Request a quote today and start turning dialogue into decisions.
