Maximizing insights through research marketplaces

What is a marketplace?

Conducting regular market research often relies on connecting with individual suppliers or panels to find the respondents you need to get the insights you want. 

Jumping from supplier to supplier can slow the time to insights, create additional work when juggling multiple vendors, and make it difficult to ensure responses are of the highest possible quality. 

That’s where a programmatic marketplace steps in. Programmatic marketplaces are platforms that enable businesses seeking market research services to connect with a wide range of sample providers. 

Making the most of a programmatic marketplace means speeding up research processes, reducing manual workloads, and having the confidence in your insights that you need to make data-driven decisions. 

Cint Exchange is our marketplace. Buyers have access to global audiences in one simplified platform that optimizes time and cost savings, while suppliers can connect with buyers across the world. 

It empowers users to gather insights at scale to build business strategies, develop research-enabled solutions, and publish credible research, while enabling organizations to move faster and make confident business decisions.

Let’s run through some of the key benefits that you get when switching your research processes to a marketplace like Cint’s.

How do marketplaces improve targeting accuracy?

Effective market research starts with knowing your target audience. Consumers have a diverse range of lifestyles, values, wants, and needs, and as such, drilling down to the individual customer segments you want to target is imperative when it comes to commissioning, conducting, and acting upon market research.

Fragmented profiling logic across multiple suppliers leads to inaccurate targeting and a heavy burden of manual data cleaning and reconciliation. Without a unified profiling standard, sample buyers and researchers can never be entirely certain that a “frequent traveller” or a “decision-maker” is defined the same way from one source to the next. 

We’ve taken a standardized approach to profiling. Suppliers are required to provide and receive respondent data in a uniform fashion. This ensures that regardless of which supplier a respondent has come from, researchers can be confident that they’ve met the same qualification criteria. 

Anyone with experience of commissioning and conducting research knows that recruiting the right respondents is predicated on solid profiling questions. As different suppliers may use different means of profiling, marketplaces offer a means of mitigating those risks by offering profiling libraries. Libraries like these are increasingly essential for researchers who need to engage niche audiences. 

By adopting a standardized way of asking questions, researchers can both improve the respondent experience and reduce terminations, helping to fill surveys with high quality responses from the right people.

How do marketplaces help you estimate how many respondents will take your survey?

Managing multiple vendors can result in fragmented data and conflicting estimates. Both outcomes make it difficult to prove the value of research. Transitioning to a one-stop marketplace — like Cint Exchange — provides researchers with a single source of truth. 

Feasibility in Cint Exchange is a feature that evaluates both the ability and likelihood of reaching a desired target group and the associated costs of doing so. These are two crucial metrics for project success.

Making the most of proprietary AI algorithms and machine learning, it forecasts the number of completes and costs based on user-defined criteria. This results in a massive marketplace that helps eliminate so-called ‘cost creep’ through providing research professionals with accurate pricing based on actual participant availability.

How can a marketplace streamline which suppliers can fill your survey?

Supply allocation allows users to control which suppliers can provide respondents for target groups, enabling management of settings and templates. Zipping between various vendors can cause headaches on this front, but our approach to supply groups helps organize suppliers into manageable categories.

Cint Exchange users can add or remove suppliers from groups and block specific suppliers as needed, while minimum and maximum settings dictate the percentage of respondents each group can provide to ensure optimum control over total supply volume. 

We also offer global supply allocation templates, each of which has been created by Cint specialists, that help reduce bias and have the ability to be customized according to customer-specific needs or wants.

Additionally, Cint Exchange researchers can create and save their own templates for future use, enhancing efficiency and accuracy.

How do marketplaces allow you to select and only pay for quality responses?

Rather than having to reconcile with each supplier individually, marketplace platforms provide a centralized interface that allows researchers to optimize the reconciliation process, saving them time and money.

At Cint, we offer researchers a reconciliation process that allows buyers to remove completes that do not meet quality standards. The Cint Exchange also makes it easy to track eligible reconciliations, meaning that customers never miss reconciliation deadlines.

When you’re working with a single source of truth, you’re only paying for high-quality data that actually fits your specific research criteria.

“The Cint Exchange enables users to streamline and unify their processes across multiple projects and suppliers whilst giving them full control over how they field their studies using feasibility settings, qualifications, exclusions, and supply allocations,” says Nick Richards. “It is a feature-rich platform that enables researchers to design their own workflows to complement their existing systems and processes, freeing them up to carry out impactful, strategic work without worrying about managing multiple sources of respondents with varying levels of quality and duplication.”

Start streamlining your research today

Our platform connects your surveys to the right people, whoever they are, wherever they are. The Cint Exchange is a marketplace that helps research professionals unlock important insights from real people, and is trusted by over 4,000 insights-driven companies.

We work with over 800 integrated supply partners across 130+ countries worldwide to ensure that niche audiences are on hand, mitigating the need to hop between suppliers. 

Our truly global scale means that we’re able to connect your research opportunities to the right people, at the right time, for the right price.

Don’t just take our word for it when it comes to the benefits of the Cint Exchange. 

“Cint Exchange has been incredibly intuitive and easy to use, making project setup quick and seamless,” says Justin Ethington, founder of Trend Candy. “The automated billing process is smooth, and the quality of data collected has consistently been excellent. The platform enables fast data collection, supporting timely insights and an efficient research process.”

Ready to forgo managing multiple vendors and make a switch to a unified marketplace? Get in touch with us today to discover how and why the Cint Exchange could be a game changer for all your research needs.