How SaaS Integrations Help Sustain Agile Data for Market Research

In today’s mobile-first digital age, market researchers would be hard-pressed not to find SaaS integrations and solutions designed to carry out market research campaigns. 

Given the efficiency that SaaS brings organizations, a colossal 94% of businesses already use SaaS products. Sustaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16.4% from 2017 to 2022, the SaaS industry is not at risk of undergoing a slowdown — on the contrary, it is slated for growth.

SaaS has also progressed into the market research space, with the prevalence of online survey tools, platforms and integrations.  

While it is undoubtable that SaaS offers value to market researchers, not all SaaS solutions foster agile data.  

In keeping with our stance on agile data for market research, this article explains how SaaS integrations can forge agile data, with a real use case example from one of our clients. 

Defining Agile Data

Agile data refers to a variety of techniques traditionally used by IT professionals to ensure effective collaboration on the various data aspects of software systems.

As opposed to entailing a uniform approach, agile data employs several techniques and philosophies to allow for efficient and productive cooperation when dealing with software systems.

Although smooth collaboration appears to be a self-evident necessity — therefore not needing the concept of agile data — in reality, it is very difficult to achieve. This is due to the different role specializations, visions and priorities among IT and data professionals.  

Thus, agile data is a crucial concept to incorporate into software systems so that teams have a stronger means of working collaboratively and quicker speed to insights.

The same notion applies to agile data in market research, given that it too relies on SaaS and copious amounts of data. 

The Need for Agile Data in Market Research

Market research requires agile data solutions in order to keep up with business needs. This entails access to accurate data on target populations through efficient means. 

In market research, such a population is often the target market, the group of consumers most likely to buy from a business and are thus the target of various business endeavors such as advertising, user testing, etc. 

Businesses pour so many investments into their target market, thus, the stakes are much higher than a traditional research project, as there is a heightened requisite to acquire an ROI. Thus, the data that market researchers extract must be above par.

But agile data in market research does not merely represent the results that a market research campaign has yielded. Rather, it requires the means of extracting the data in the first place to be agile as well.  

As such, SaaS solutions in market research must offer agile data aggregation and agile interfaces. Most market research SaaS exists in the form of an online survey platform, given that effective survey studies provide a vast array of insights for market research projects. 

But not all of these survey platforms are optimized for agile data. There are several ways for a survey platform to provide agile solutions. The first was via the aforementioned mobile-first approach (link above). 

You can also gain agile data through the use of SaaS integrations. That way, you are not limited to relying on a survey platform on its own. 

How SaaS Integrations Build and Strengthen Agile Data 

SaaS integrations buttress various business endeavors, including those of market research. This is because using SaaS integrations with a main solution or even in tandem with smaller solutions, strengthens your market research campaigns with an ecosystem instead of a lone wolf market research platform. 

The addition of integrating your existing SaaS solutions in your market research certainly has its advantages. SaaS products are built to cultivate agile data and provide other advantages as add-ons to your main SaaS provider. 

In order for an online survey tool to gain agile data, its SaaS integrations must advance the key efficiencies found within agile data. These include:

1. Easing collaborations
2. Enhancing the features of your online survey platform or other market research SaaS
3. Using only the aspects of each software that you only need due to the presence of more than one SaaS
4. Identifying course changes more quickly, and holding market research directly accountable for business results. 
5. Organizing data for practical survey data analysis 
6. Accessing information sooner
7. Improving the quality of data
8. Garnering further insights delivered at speed

SaaS Integrations Use Case with a Pollfish Client

There is a vast amount of available SaaS integrations for market research products, even if they are not all built the same and do not offer the same functionalities.

In order to generate agile data, market researchers, business owners and marketers need to employ the correct SaaS integrations, particularly those that help researchers gain the benefits laid out in the prior section.

To prove that SaaS integrations can build agile data for market research, the below explains how a Pollfish customer was able to do just that: use a SaaS integration to sustain agile data for their market research needs.

One of our clients in our vast clientele pool is an audio streaming and media services provider. 

The audio streaming provider has multiple accounts on the Pollfish platform, including a main account, which runs surveys across the world, in over 15 countries. The main account is used for various market research needs, which include:

• creative testing
• ad testing 
• push notification concepts

With 9 users on the account and various survey campaigns in the works, the streaming provider is in constant need of agile data. There is little room for error in the main account of such a major enterprise; it therefore has the necessities that only agile data can provide.

These exigencies include: 

• speedy insights
• ease of collaborations
• enhanced data organization and displays
• quality data
• a smooth integration

The audio streaming client was able to fulfill these needs through an integration with BigQuery on the Pollfish platform. BigQuery is a serverless warehouse on which the client was able to build a massive dashboard.

This SaaS integration allowed the client to store, segment and view the data that it extracted from Pollfish in their BigQuery dashboard. It enabled the client to route all the Pollfish data into the BigQuery database in real-time. This includes survey demographics, respondent profiles and the questionnaire content itself. 

Pollfish was able to provide agile data through its platform’s capabilities, along with the friction-free integration with BigQuery, which allowed the media client to view and segment their Pollfish data. 

Additionally, the client was able to keep track of several performance metrics, receive translated responses from Pollfish and was able to benchmark their metrics on a rolling basis. 

All in all, the media client was able to quickly and efficiently make use of their data via a SaaS integration on the Pollfish platform.

Striving for Agile Data in Market Research

The agile data (AD) concept is a method involving various strategies for IT professionals to implement in software systems. Used in different situations, agile data is used to improve collaborations and other kinds of productivity, while avoiding snafus. 

Agile data is a must in market research and other data-heavy industries — and most industries must rely on consumer data in order to build customer loyalty and remain competitive. Thus, numerous sectors can stand to use agile data solutions.

In market research, the key is to choose an online survey platform that can provide agile data — in a proven way. SaaS integrations are one of the ways in which such a platform can remain agile, that is, if the integration itself and the integrated platform permit agility.