The Role of Automation in Market Research

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The Role of Automation in Market Research Correlation
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Market research is an indispensable resource for companies to stay in the know of customer needs and market demands. As the competition increase, so does the need to gain valuable customer insights and align with the evolving demand. 

Over the years, market research tools have undergone significant upgrades due to technological advancements. Traditional MR, which relied on manual data collection and analysis, was time-consuming and resource intensive. It delayed the process of finding insightful data. 

However, the advent of automation has sped up market research. It eliminates the time and resources wasted on manual tasks to help you focus more on extracting meaningful insights. Automated market research tools enable you to gather accurate insights at a much faster pace and affordable rate. 

In this blog, we’ll explore the role of automation in market research and its impact in the industry. 

What is automation in market research?

Market research automation uses technology to reduce human tasks in the process of gathering market insights. The implementation of automation in market research software enables brands to conduct their own research. 

Instead of investing in a research agency and having them run market research for you, you can leverage a self-serve platform to design a survey, collect and analyze data and create reports. In doing so, the research becomes more cost, time, and resource effective. 

Automated market research tools allow you to be more involved in the research. Direct involvement enables you to become more productive and actionable in your decision-making.  

Market research software automation means that the end-to-end platform includes functionalities for survey design, sampling, data collection, analysis, and reporting. It can handle full-scope research and provides a DIY platform for you to design a survey based on your research needs. 

What role does automation play in market research?

In today’s fast-paced world, companies require timely and accurate insights to respond quickly and effectively to market dynamics. While traditional research methods have been effective in the past, they come with inherent limitations such as limited sample size, higher costs, time-consuming, and potential for bias. 

Automation provides a solution for this limitation and streamlines and accelerates market research. Here are some ways that automation in market research accelerates the time to insights. 

  • Survey routing
  • Automated data collection
  • Automated data analysis
  • Automated reporting. 

1. Survey routing –

Automation makes it easier to design surveys that ask relevant questions only. Survey routing helps you navigate respondents through the survey based on their responses to previous questions.

For example, if a participant says they have used the products from Brand A, then they will be directed toward questions asking more about Brand A. 

Survey routing/ skip logic enables you to create a complex network of questions with a few clicks. It makes the survey design process much simpler for the researchers and enables you to provide an engaging survey experience to respondents.

2. Automated data collection –

Automated data collection tools help you gather accurate data in real time. It allows you to streamline data from online surveys, mobile apps/websites, social media surveys, and more. The tool gathers a large volume of data from multiple sources in a fraction of the time. 

Moreover, using the platform, you can apply automated data cleaning to remove any inconsistencies in the collected data. 

Additionally, with end-to-end market research software that gives you access to an online research panel, you can create your own representative sample and automate data collection. Access to the target audience and seamless data collection ensures that you can gather data anytime and on any device across the world. 

3. Automated data analysis –

Automated data analysis tools utilize algorithms and ML to automate analysis as data flows into the system. It processes a large amount of data quickly and categorizes it to subject it to statistical or qualitative data analysis. 

In the traditional method, you need to upload the data manually, send the file to the data processing team, and review the data to begin the analysis. With market research software automation, you can analyze the data as the research goes on. This expedites the time needed to generate the final report. 

Rapid processing and reduction of manual tasks eliminate errors and improve data accuracy and reliability. It facilitates decision-making while also enabling it to iterate analysis if required. 

4. Automated reporting –

Report generation in market research encourages discussion of insights and findings. Stakeholders care most about this stage of the research process in order to respond quickly to the insights. 

Automated reporting presents data in an interactive format, such as dashboards. The functionality updates the chart with the analysis of new data and enables you to filter through it to showcase particular insights. Additionally, you can share access to the dashboard across the organization. 

The automated report reduces the time to design charts and graphs manually and creates visually appealing reports. This ensures consistency and accuracy in the presentation of data. Moreover, it ensures that the reports align with your organization’s branding and reporting guidelines. 

Automating these four roles is how market research software can help you accelerate time to insights. 

Additional read: 6 market research trends to look out for.

What are the advantages of using automation in market research?

Now that we have listed down the role of automation in market research, we will also look into the benefits of automated market research tools. 

  • Productivity
  • Accuracy and precision
  • Accessibility of real-time data
  • Agility
  • Cost saving

1. Productivity: 

When you don’t have to run manual and repetitive tasks, you are bound to become more productive. This is what market research software automation does. Automation gives you the freedom to direct efforts on more innovative pursuits.  

Time is valuable for a researcher, and automated research software can help you keep speed up the research process. Moreover, it enables you to be on pace with the rapidly changing market demands. 

You can streamline your research and focus on actionable insights and decision-making. 

2. Accuracy and precision:

Automation provides you with insights with higher accuracy and reliability. By eliminating the need for manual data entry, cleaning, analysis, and reporting, you reduce the chance of errors in research findings. 

Additionally, automation can boost data precision by ensuring that you gather data on questions relevant to the respondent. By routing participants to questions that resonate with their interests and experience, you ensure data reliability and accuracy. 

3.  Accessibility of real-time data:

In this fast-changing market dynamics, you can’t make confident decisions if you don’t have timely data. Automation helps you overcome this challenge by enabling you to launch online surveys on a wide scale and gather and analyze data in real-time. 

Real-time dashboard updates analyzed data so you can monitor insights without having to wait for the data collection to end. 

4. Agility:

With end-to-end and self-serve market research software, you gain the advantage of agility. You can change questions/ answer options in your survey on your own without needing to inform any middleman. 

With the live dashboard, the reporting also becomes more agile. You don’t need to export or send updated files after every analysis. An interactive live dashboard updates automatically, making it easy for you to share reports with stakeholders and keep them updated. 

5. Cost saving:

Automated market research tools reduce costs associated with hiring people for data entry and data processing and investing in multiple tools for different research processes. It gives you an end-to-end platform and streamlines workflows resulting in significant cost-saving. 

Additional read: How to Choose the Right Market Research Survey Software for Your Business?

Good insights can be the difference between being a market leader and a laggard. 

Agile methods can help transform your business, download the guide to start using the agile approach for your research.

What are some misconceptions about market research automation?

Thanks to market research software automation, research that took weeks to complete can now be done in hours. While there are many benefits that contribute to its rising significance, there are some concerns as well. 

Here are four common misconceptions about automation in market research that we will address. 

  • The automated market research tool is difficult to use
  • You need many tools to run market research
  • The tool doesn’t give control over your sample
  • It doesn’t allow room for customization

Let’s dive in!

1. The automated market research tool is difficult to use: 

The advent of automated market research tools has made it easy and simple for anyone to design and launch their research. While many users may be apprehensive about using a DIY or self-serve tool, the software is designed to make brands capable of running their own surveys. 

Automating many of the repetitive tasks allows you to focus your efforts on idea generation and ensure feedback alignment with the research objective. 

2. You need many tools to run market research: 

An end-to-end platform like Voxco offers a one-stop platform to perform entire research. Instead of investing in many tools for different purposes like survey design, data collection, analysis, and visualization, you can perform each task within the same platform. 

Access to different tools for different purposes in one platform helps speed up each stage of the research process, making it time and cost-effective. 

3. The tool doesn’t give control over your sample: 

Market research tools with built-in online research panels give you complete control over selecting panelists for your research. Moreover, with methods like encrypted links and duplicate IP checks, you can detect and eliminate survey fraud. 

4. It doesn’t allow room for customization

Market research software automation does not mean complete standardization. You can configure any automated market research tool to add your branding as per your brand’s research guidelines. 

Voxco helps the top 50 MR firms & 500+ global brands gather omnichannel feedback, measure sentiment, uncover insights, and act on them.

See how Voxco can enhance your research efficiency.

When should you use market research automation?

While we are towards the end of our blog trying to understand the role of automation in market research, let’s look under which circumstances it is beneficial. 

  • When running a large-scale survey, automation can streamline the data collection and handle an extensive volume of data for analysis. 
  • Automated market research can be invaluable for time-sensitive research. 
  • The tool can be of help when you want to conduct research on your own and be directly involved. 
  • Automated tools can simplify a longitudinal study. It can automate data collection and updates, track changes, and provide real-time insights. 

Wrapping up;

With the evolution of technology, market research will also continue to evolve and adapt. Automation will become significant in helping researchers uncover hidden insights, identify patterns, and generate actionable insights. It will enable you to leverage data to its full potential. 

From data collection to reporting, automation provides the advantage of speed, agility, accuracy, and scalability. It helps keep pace with and respond promptly to market dynamics.  

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