Today, in a society where every product and service is rated, “taking into account customer needs and customer satisfaction are key points in companies’ online strategies. Moreover, ‘79% of consumers want brands to consider their interests before’ making a purchase” (Wunderman agency). It therefore appears essential to gather as much information as possible on clients and prospects to ensure the success of your marketing strategy. Customer knowledge is key. For this, the consumer panel is the solution. Trustt explains how to use the marketing panel in your strategy.
Marketing Panel: Definition and Objectives
Consumer Panel: Definition
A marketing panel or consumer panel is a representative sample of people who are customers or marketing targets (personas) of a company, brand, product, or service. The panelists (panel members) are selected for their consumption and purchasing habits, their socio-professional category, or even their gender and age.
The panel is defined according to the brand’s target audience to get useful feedback. The panelists are therefore consumers, men and women, volunteers, who report on their experience with a product or service during an online study (questionnaire for example) or in person with a test or tasting of the product in question.
What is the Purpose of a Consumer Panel?
During the panel, panelists express their feelings, opinions, and views on the product or service being tested. They also share their needs and expectations for the product or service based on the promise made by the brand.
Their feedback, also called consumer insights, is valuable for brands as it allows, through the data collected, to:
- Review the product: adapt the formula (in the case of cosmetic products for example), quality, safety, packaging, or even the promise;
- Evolve the marketing strategy: sales arguments, distribution channels, price positioning, communication strategy;
- Validate or not the market launch of the product or service;
- Improve customer knowledge: consumption habits, expectations.
How to Launch a Consumer Panel?
When a company seeks to conduct a consumer panel, two options are possible:
- Use the services of a polling agency and outsource the management of surveys and studies;
- Conduct the panel internally within the company by recruiting its own panelists to conduct surveys and tests.
These two solutions have advantages and disadvantages, depending on the objectives and budget of the company.
Forming and Managing Your Consumer Panel
Why Create Your Own Consumer Panel?
Creating your own consumer panel has many advantages:
- Have a quality panel, composed of qualified consumers, according to the company’s needs and ready to be solicited;
- Conduct product studies and campaigns more frequently;
- Delve deeper into certain points of previous studies with a new study or test on a specific part of the previous one;
- Improve the response rate to surveys and questionnaires;
- Freely use the data and information from test results;
- In the long term, save money on panel formation costs.
Contrary to what one might think, forming your own panel is not more tedious or time-consuming than entrusting the management of this task to an agency that you will have to brief for each study. On the contrary, having your own panel allows you to save money in the long run by saving agency fees.
Create Your Panel Using an Ambassador Program
Integrating an ambassador program like Trustt’s on your website helps you build the perfect consumer panel. This program primarily allows you to recruit your ambassadors (or panelists) from among your visitors and customers. To simplify things, the Trustt solution, with its ultra-sophisticated machine learning algorithm, SophIA, helps you identify the right ambassadors based on their affinity with your products and their potential to engage with your brand.
You can then manage these ambassadors by administering questionnaires, surveys, or tests to obtain detailed feedback and reviews on your products and thus collect qualified consumer data. Such a module allows you to gather quality data, which you own, that will help you evolve your products and offers.
Depending on your products, you may need to create several panels with different consumer profiles. In this context, the Trustt solution allows you to simplify the management of multiple panels by handling publication requests, follow-ups, and collection of photo and video testimonials.
Discover Trustt
Trustt is a digital marketing solution that allows you to create a virtuous circle between your brand and your consumers.Integrating the Marketing Panel into Your Strategy
In the interest of “customer listening and consumer satisfaction, it is imperative to add the panel to your marketing strategy. The analysis of data and results allows you to both act upstream of the launch of your products or services and downstream,” adapt products or marketing strategy if needed (distribution, positioning, price, advertising). Testing your products is now the key to success.
By proceeding this way, you ensure that you offer quality products and services that meet consumer expectations, and have a high customer satisfaction rate. From this satisfaction stems a virtuous circle. If you have quality reviews of your products and a brand image that listens to your customers, this contributes to the development of your business and your turnover. So, what are you waiting for to integrate the marketing panel into your strategy?
