With their precision insights from engaged members of a target audience, research panels are among the best tools in market research for audience insights and strategic decision-making. By using them, businesses can spot trends, collect consumer insights, better understand consumer behavior, and collect specific data relating to business strategies and marketing campaigns. Studies show that using a panel to conduct market research improves overall data reliability.
Accessibility and convenience are key advantages of an online research panel. They offer an opportunity for consistent check-ins with a whole target market or audience, including those that can be hard to reach. And once the pool is recruited, you have a ready and willing target audience for input — there’s no need to find new respondents each time you want to collect data.
Bellomy’s blend: B2C and B2B panels drive actionable insights
Bellomy manages more than two dozen B2C panels for sectors including utilities and CPG/retail. In addition, we maintain two proprietary panels — a GenPop B2C panel and a financial B2B panel. Together these panels comprise nearly 53,000 members. As of early December, the projection is 2.8 million completed surveys, 656 hours of qualitative engagements and 91 million analyzed verbatims for 2023.
SmartLab: The right audience for relevant data
We established SmartLab, one of Bellomy’s two proprietary panels, in 2014 as a general population online panel for consumer market research. Accordingly, we manage SmartLab’s membership so that it approximately matches the U.S. population in terms of demographics, including age, gender, race, family structure, income, ethnicity, education, and geography. Approximately 15 Bellomy client-partners across consumer-packaged goods, retail, automotive, financial services, utilities, food services and technology sectors regularly tap SmartLab for conducting market research there.
Financial Advisor Community: A Decade of Niche B2B Insights
Bellomy’s other proprietary panel, the Financial Advisor Community, is a B2B online market research panel comprising approximately 1,100 financial professionals. The FAC is about a decade old and grew out of conversation with a client-partner looking to field an annual survey to collect research data from financial advisors. This ultimately led to us creating an unbranded respondent panel of financial advisors to provide insights and opinions about their jobs, clients and industry trends and fueling clients with meaningful thought leadership and industry data to drive product creation, marketing strategies and better understanding of the daily experience of financial advisors. Members of this niche group engage in a variety of panel activities like surveys, UX testing and in-depth interviews.
Developing an innovative market research tool
To meet market research needs internally as well as those of external clients, the Bellomy Insights Technology team spent years developing and refining a suite of analytics tools that we consider among the top market research tools available.
As new technology, including artificial intelligence, becomes available, the Insights Technology team integrates it into the functionality of our market research platform. Today, our Research Cloud includes the following market research tools: text analytics, dashboards, queries, cross tabs, media galleries, data visualization, AI workflows, an AI assistant and various business process applications.
Many of these features are united under the AI Analytics for Text tool and available to users beyond Bellomy client-partners. Its prebuilt models and customizable options empower users to quickly discover the main drivers behind consumer sentiment, emotion, behavior, operational activities, and more.
A custom, AI-powered cloud for your best market research
Users access all Bellomy’s marketing tools through the personalized, customizable Bellomy Research Cloud. Regular updates and maintenance to the cloud’s system keep the AI current and at optimal performance. The Research Cloud also features tight permissions that can be set to a granular level within an organization’s account, so what happens in your cloud space stays in your cloud space.
Ensuring a safe and secure ecosystem
Bellomy’s security process is established and longstanding. General, companywide measures include end-to-end encryption and regular external penetration tests. Team members are highly trained according to industry best practices, and all Bellomy products and services are ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II audited and HIPAA compliant.
Beyond this, our AI integrations have high levels of built-in protection to ensure no personal information is shared beyond Bellomy. While we employ an ensemble AI approach, our own secure, proprietary AI model never sends any personally identifiable client information to external models. Additionally, we’ve created a proprietary process that obfuscates data shared with external models. That means no names, email addresses, phone numbers, etc., ever leave Bellomy’s ecosystem.
The intersection of panel services & cloud technology
With its capacity for data collection, data analysis, and data storage, the Bellomy research tool is essential to panel management. Considering the scope of panel output (as noted earlier, 2023 projections are for 2.8 million completed surveys, 656 hours of qualitative engagements and 91 million analyzed verbatims), the Research Cloud is hugely beneficial in terms of research panel efficiency, cost-effectiveness, speed, and accuracy.
AI analytics for in-depth data insights
The AI analytics tool can quickly and accurately analyze a vast quantity of qualitative feedback (like discussions, in-depth interviews and survey open-ends) and organize data according to theme, topic, positive and negative sentiments and more. This is true even for the cloud’s media galleries feature, which includes automatic transcriptions. The tool also is capable of generating topic models and making recommendations. Working with the AI Assistant, we can continue drilling down the data.
AI integrations streamline panel management
The RC’s AI integrations have streamlined panel management exponentially. We employ AI to mitigate the risk of things like survey bots and inappropriate language in forums and discussions. The AI Assistant augments panel email communications and helps create assets like blogs used to keep panelists informed.
Research Cloud enhances client deliverables
The Research Cloud’s functionality allows for fast, accurate, frequent reporting to clients. The cloud also accommodates vast storage, so Bellomy staff members who work with panels often archive reports there for the client’s historical knowledge. We create dashboards for panel health reports, which puts real-time insights at the client’s fingertips with just a few clicks.
Empowering clients with premier market research tools
For hands-on clients who are very involved in the performance of their panel, the Research Cloud allows independent access to all the data they might want to explore. There were more than 3,500 client-users on the Research Cloud in 2023. With some experience, clients can gain valuable insights by confidently navigating the Research Cloud to find relevant data, identify trends, visualize data and more. The Research Cloud’s media galleries were a welcome innovation for many clients, who appreciate the opportunity to easily see their panelists in one easily accessible space for studies where these assets are collected.
Unlocking market share with Bellomy’s research solutions
The power of Bellomy’s panel research capabilities paired with our unparalleled research tools unlocks the most current, in-depth market insights to drive business success. If you’re interested in learning how our tailored solutions can benefit you, we invite you to get in touch.