Adaptability and versatility are key to the success of any business – you only need to look back at the last 18 months to prove this.

The digital revolution was only further accelerated by the pandemic, and we’ve seen more and more professionals embrace technology as part of their everyday working life.

Digital solutions can boast a range of benefits when it comes to your market research, too. For example, they can transform your focus groups to unlock greater potential and more actionable outcomes for your business.

Online focus groups provide an effective means of amplifying your audience’s feedback to ensure your brand is surpassing expectations and staying attuned to your brand community. 

That’s why, in today’s post, we’re exploring six benefits of hosting your next focus group online, finding innovative ways to meet consumer demand and understand customer opinions.

Cost-effective 

Hosting focus groups online can offer financial benefits to your business when compared to face-to-face alternatives.

From travel expenses to space rental, in-person focus groups can quickly become an expensive practice for your business. This places extra pressure on extracting the most valuable input possible from your participants to justify the cost.

When hosting your focus groups online, this pressure is removed – you’re able to host on free video software such as Zoom or Google Meets, or even in private discussion areas on your community platform.

This all amounts to a less intensive back and forth between moderator and participants, which is likely to inspire more transparent and insightful feedback as a result (and all for a fraction of the cost to your business).

Not only that – with the money saved by hosting your focus group online, you may even have the funding spare to action the outcomes of your focus group for the same price it would’ve cost to conduct the research face-to-face.

More efficient 

From start to finish, online focus groups are objectively more efficient than their in-person counterparts.

For starters, you’re able to arrange virtual focus groups with less notice – this means clients, moderators and respondents don’t need to carve as much time out of their schedule or make travel arrangements. This enables your business to be more versatile, arranging focus groups quickly and reactively whenever the need arises (such as following an unforeseen change in your industry, for example).

Online focus groups also ensure outcomes can be communicated and actioned more efficiently. Real-time participation can be documented in an instant and, when held on community platforms, can be accessed collaboratively by all of those who need to be in the know.

All of this contributes to a more optimised process, helping your business to extract more value from each focus group you host.

More diversity  

The purpose of a focus group is to facilitate the sharing of opinions and perspectives of consumers on a brand, product or service.

The importance of ensuring diversity amongst your participants therefore speaks for itself – the greater range of perspectives you can invite, the better your understanding of consumer attitudes will be.

When hosting an in-person focus group, geographical restrictions play a role in the types of participants you attract. Of course, this isn’t the case when conducting a focus group remotely – participants can come from anywhere, enabling you to better represent the entire scope of your target audience.

Because of the geographical restrictions of an in-person focus group, the pool of participants available is naturally smaller. This can make it statistically harder to ensure your focus group is ethnically diverse. Again, virtual focus groups provide a solution to this problem, helping you to better represent a wider range of cultures and audience backgrounds, ensuring you paint a more rounded picture of audience reception as a result.

More valuable input

Not only do virtual focus groups boast a better pool of participants – they tend to generate more valuable input, too.

This is because, generally, participants feel more comfortable partaking from home. With physical barriers removed and an aspect of anonymity preserved, participants are less inclined to feel intimidated by group discussions or feel nervous about expressing a negative opinion. 

The more comfortable your focus group is, the more critical and transparent their contributions tend to be. This can be incredibly valuable to brands – not only will the feedback be more honest, but it may also contain fresh community perspectives you haven’t yet considered.

A modern method 

Virtual focus groups are also a great way of bringing your brand (and your business research skills) well into the 21st century.

By embracing modern research methods, you’re positioning your brand at the forefront of your industry in the eyes of your community and wider consumers. Hosting your focus groups on a community platform will only further this perception by embracing contemporary best practices – blurring the line between community and brand.

By embracing technology in your focus groups, your engagement scope increases substantially, too. With the ability to engage a larger number of participants at any one time, you’re able to enjoy the best of both worlds: quantitative data supported by qualitative insights directly from your community.

Encourage community participation

As we just touched on, hosting virtual focus groups can be super effective in blurring the line between community and brand.

By being able to amplify more voices within your community (thanks to the extra accessibility of hosting your focus group online), you can strengthen community engagement by not only telling your audience you hear them, but showing your audience you hear them. 

With this in mind, don’t be afraid to shout about it when you’re hosting an upcoming online focus group to let willing participants know how and when they can get involved. This all amounts to encouraging more community participation from your members, driving greater engagement and more worthwhile contributions as a result.

Focus groups have long been a tried and tested method for business research, but, with so many benefits on offer, now’s the time to bring this practice into the 21st century. Begin hosting your focus groups virtually to begin reaping the rewards of more valuable community input today.

Here at Six Circles, community engagement is our bread and butter. That’s why we’ve made it easy to host virtual focus groups within the forum and private threads area of our community engagement platform. Get in touch now to request a demo and see for yourself how your brand could unlock the power of community building.