See all 'How to Use Virtual Audiences' modules...
Add your topic or question
Access Virtual Audiences by clicking ‘Talk to Virtual Consumers’ on the home page of Yabble.
Alternatively, you can navigate to ‘Projects’ and click ‘New Project’ > ‘Virtual Audience’
What do you want to know? This can be any question you’re looking to find an answer to. If you have a specific target audience, you can enter this information here too. For example, “How do Americans millennials feel about McDonald’s products and customer service when compared with other large fast-food chains available?”
Top tip: Keep your topic short and focused
The AI uses natural language to understand what you input here, so there is flexibility. Some examples of Virtual Audiences topics we have run:
What do consumers prefer when it comes to features in smartphones, laptops, and other tech gadgets?
Understanding audience preferences for different types of content, platforms (streaming, traditional TV, etc.), and genres.
How do Americans perceive Hershey’s confectionary products, and how do they compare its products to other confectionary brands?
What are Gen Z's distinct behaviors, preferences and values? How does this compare to other generations?
Your topic could be phrased as a research question, or as a topic on its own. Try to keep this specific and concise – if you have multiple research questions, it is best to create a few separate Virtual Audiences projects.
Choose which augmented data project you would like to proceed with – Market Insights Only, or Virtual Audiences.
Market Insights gets you access to professional-level market insights and market trends that relate to your market of interest.
Virtual Audiences gets Market Insights as well, but also get a plethora of other useful insights creation tools. Unlock a new level of market insights with interactive personas – survey and interview your target audience, create a knowledge lake of your data and unlock actionable insights, get unlimited chat with your personas, and easily export all of these insights in a customizable PDF report.
Once you’ve submitted your topic, it can’t be changed, but you can tweak your target audience at the next step.
Yabble’s AI will take 4-5 minutes to process your research question and start collecting data to build a knowledge lake that is relevant to your topic of choice. During this process, the AI will generate market insights and trends related to your topic, as well as a set of personas relevant to your topic, and a set of survey questions designed to uncover insights about your topic.
Market Insights and Market Trends
The first insights you will see, regardless of which augmented data product you chose at the beginning of the process, are your Market Insights and Market Trends reports. These are the first parts of your knowledge lake to be generated.
Market Insights include reputably sourced insights that are specific to the market related to your topic. These meso-level insights can include (but are not limited to) a market overview, consumer preferences, demographic patterns, and more. This becomes the context for your Virtual Audiences project related directly to your topic.
Market Trends include reputably sourced, broader, macro-level indicators of trends and other factors that are likely to have an influence on your chosen topic. This can include insights like shifts in consumer preferences, economic conditions, behavioral trends, regional preferences, and more. These are all elements that surround your topic that we believe are important for your Virtual Audience to have context of to convey a broader understanding of the market.
Validate your personas
Based on your topic, Yabble will generate a group of 8 personas. You have the chance to define your audience further and re-generate these personas. For example, you might want to say they must be in the state of Texas and be aged between 18-45, with a household income of $100K+.
You’ll see a summarization of each persona and what defines them in terms of age, location, personality traits, paint points, behaviors and goals. Each persona is also given a weighting, which you can adjust if you choose.
If you need to make edits to these personas, you can update the target audience summary and click ‘Regenerate’.
Otherwise, click ‘Continue to questions’ to proceed.
Approve your questions
Approve or amend your survey questions. These are built with Yabble’s decades of research expertise, but you can customize these or add as many as 20 of your own survey questions.
Once you are happy with your edits, click ‘Complete and continue’.
You now have the option to review all of your selections before completing your project.
If you want to change your personas or survey questions, you can click the ‘Back’ button to make these changes.
Once you are happy with your personas and questions, click ‘Generate Insights’ to proceed. This kicks off the process of distilling the knowledge lake, using the personas and questions you approved, to create insights about your topic.
This step is where credits will be deducted from your Yabble credit balance. If you do not have sufficient credits to process the Virtual Audiences project, the system will prompt you to purchase more.
Once you’ve followed all these steps and your Virtual Audience insights have been generated, you can start to dive into the insights and persona chat. See our article on 'Interpreting your Virtual Audiences insights' to find out how.