During times of economic downturn, we often see companies tighten up their marketing and insights budgets. In fact, a recent survey of more than 1,000 decision-makers found that just 10% expect their marketing spend to increase in the next year, with the rest unsure about how their budget for the year will pan out. Which 1) leaves a lot of room for uncertainty and 2) begs the question, how can you still deliver rich insights when budgets are shrinking?
This blog will discuss 5 ways you can still hit your insights mark without the extra resources.
- Leverage AI to help reduce workload and cost
- In-house your insights agency
- Virtual Audiences
- Community Panels
- Building Relationships
1. Leverage AI to help reduce workload and cost
Budget cuts can be a catalyst for finding new creative solutions to pretty much anything. And this certainly applies to research and insights. Think about introducing AI tools to reduce workload and provide value – it’s been a big year for AI, with companies looking for ways to incorporate AI tools into daily operations. AI is now being considered across the entire research journey.
So, whether you have mountains of unstructured qualitative data, masses of customer feedback from surveys or you’re lacking the right data to answer questions, AI can assist quickly and cost effectively.
Yabble’s AI solutions save up to 70% on analysis time for qualitative and quantitative projects, freeing up our customers’ time to focus on applying human insights to their projects quicker than ever before. In the last 6 months alone, we have saved our customers over 150,000 minutes (about 3 and a half months) of time and over $10million in analysis time.
AI is opening up opportunities to significantly reduce laborious manual data processing and decrease your time and cost to insight across the entire research journey.
Book a demo with the Yabble team today so learn how our world leading AI solutions can help you free up your time and budget.
2. In-house your insights agency
External agency partners can be an amazing resource for insights teams, but they often come with a large price tag. To help offset agency partner costs, many businesses are looking to bring additional insights help in house.
So, what does ‘in-housing’ look like?
One of the most common ‘in-housing’ solutions is to bring DIY survey, analysis and / or customer panel tools into your organization. These tools allow you to run projects from end-to-end internally, with many platform providers also offering expert support to help you along the way.
Yabble is a DIY platform for insights teams, and we offer a full survey suite, integrated partnerships for panel samples, and the best generative AI analysis tools on the market. Yabble also has an expert customer success and research team to support you with questionnaire drafting and launching your projects, as well as access to Virtual Audiences (see below) to help your insights budget go further.
A few examples of how you could use Yabble to in-house your research or parts of your research:
- Run a quantitative survey direct, using Yabble’s survey tools and panel partnerships – you can script, buy sample, launch the project and see results in real time.
- Cut down on analysis costs by feeding your customer experience, brand tracking or adhoc data through Yabble Count – an AI engine 1000 x faster than a human that automatically themes and codes open ended questions.
- Interrogate both your qualitative and quantitative data, using natural language with Yabble Gen, an AI research assistant that is available 24/7 to provide you with insights on any project.
- Do your own qualitative analysis with Yabble Summarize – just feed in the raw interviews and have ready-made executive summaries to share with your business.
- Host a community panel (see below) and do more insight studies for less. Yabble’s community panel product is a multi-award-winning application.
- Run a study using Yabble’s new Virtual Audiences (see below), a fast and cost-effective alternative to traditional surveys.
3. Virtual Audiences
Access to virtual audiences, powered by augmented data, will be particularly impactful for companies with constrained budgets. Augmented data is the layering of data and knowledge on top of Large Language Models to get accurate and robust insights. It is a fast and accurate way of getting a baseline understanding holistically of the market, consumer sentiment and trends. It’s also wonderful for hypothesis testing, an exploration of where to go next with your research, and to understand the differences across markets.
Yabble’s Virtual Audiences product uses augmented data to provide more access to insights for less than a third of the cost of traditional research. Generating insights from Yabble’s Virtual Audiences is as simple as entering a topic you are exploring or a question you want answers to, and you will be guided through a process that creates accurate, reliable insights almost instantly. If you are currently relying solely on an agency for your insights, consider replacing some of that spend on Yabble’s Virtual Audiences to generate actionable insights in a fraction of the time and cost.
So, what are virtual audiences?
They are essentially AI generated customer personas, that you can interact with and generate insights from relative to your topic or question. Yabble’s Virtual Audiences are infinitely knowledgeable as they draw their knowledge from Yabble’s augmented data. This is data created from Large Language Models, social media, trends analysis, customer reviews, behavioral statistics, and where appropriate your own proprietary datasets.
If you’re interested in virtual audiences powered by augmented data, sign up to join our waitlist for the Yabble Virtual Audiences product.
4. Community Panels
Always buying market sample for your insights projects can be time consuming, costly, and challenging. To solve for this, more and more companies are forming their own customer community panels to save money and time while still gathering rich insights. The collaborative nature of these panels often results in tons of feedback, lots of open discussion, and far less cost to deliver insight. They are perfect for sharing new concepts, brainstorming new ideas, and working through a large list of insight questions.
If you are looking for a place to cut your spending, creating your own community panel may be a perfect option. As well as world leading AI tools, Yabble offers MyPanel, a multi-award-winning community panel product where you can house your own customer panel of any size and make use of our survey and AI analysis tools.
5. Building Relationships
Finally, when budgets tighten up, it’s a great time to ensure you have strong internal and external relationships and align yourself with other departments / teams.
A lack of budget does not mean there is suddenly no need for research. Get to know the needs of your fellow departments. Think critically about where additional insights work could be beneficial and work in partnership with your insights agencies and platform providers to think creatively about how these insights can be delivered in a budget constrained way. This allows you to continue the important insights work your company will inevitably need, learn more about your broader organization and also what your insight partners can provide. Win, win, win.
Budget cuts don’t have to be synonymous with reduced research insights. But they may mean that you have to get a little creative about how you go about collecting your data and creating your insights. If you can look at budget cuts as an opportunity to try new methods, optimize your current resources, and learn new skills – you are on track to deliver rich insights. And if you want to learn more about how Yabble can support you on this journey, we’d be happy to walk you through what Yabble has to offer.
