Best Practices in Organizing Your Audio and Video for Efficient Market Research

Gathering data for market research starts easily with a video device and an audio sampler. However, the organizing stage can get complex depending on your next steps.

Collecting qualitative data in the form of audio and video recordings for market research is one thing. It’s another to ensure that all gathered files are organized in order to draw well-informed conclusions afterward. Both are crucial stages in conducting efficient market research.

Why?

You can’t just collect data, throw it all into your report, and expect everything to make sense. Research teams face the daunting problems of organizing, managing, analyzing, and giving meaning to audio and video recordings from IDIs and focus groups. There must be a system for organizing your research data to make it easier to get the insights you need.. 

Therefore, it’s essential to employ these five tips to managing your audio and video files for market research.

Five Easy Ways to Organize Your Audio and Video Market Research Data:

1. Check your data

You need to set a limit to the amount of data you need to obtain and have specific metrics that will help you determine if you have gathered enough data. Double-check the files to make sure nothing has any issues. Play each one from start to finish so you know if there’s a crucial need to re-do or fix any of the files before it’s too late and you’re already too deep in the research.

2. Label your files accordingly

Once you have gathered sufficient data, label each file properly. If you let it pile up before doing so, renaming it will be more challenging and confusing. Imagine having tons of audio recordings and market research video clips on your computer with similar-looking thumbnails and numbers for file names.

It’ll be tough to tell which file is which, and it will cost you more time in the long run. It would also help if you come up with a naming structure to make it easily identifiable and searchable.

3. Organize through folder categorization/segmentation

You can avoid sifting through many files by creating specific folders per project. This way, it’ll be easier for you and your team to sort out, categorize, and look for files afterward. 

Another segmentation method separates the data according to elements such as in-depth interviews and focus group discussions, the type of respondents, or sub-topics . This will depend on which strategy would work best for you and your team.

4. Review your files and edit out unnecessary details

Once you’re done sorting out the files and distributing them into the necessary folders, recheck your audio and video files to see if anything needs editing or trimming for conciseness. You may have experienced clicking the stop button a little later than you’re supposed to and captured or recorded more running time than needed. You can easily trim these unimportant cuts away from the audio or video.

5. Incorporate a reliable management platform

Civicom’s Glide Central is a video curation platform for market researchers. It allows you to store, organize, and even retrieve data in designated folders where you can manage multiple projects simultaneously. You can also tag project folders or files using specific keywords, making it easier to search for them within the platform.

Glide also lets you place time markers as reference points to particular portions of your recording and leave comments so your teammates know why that particular moment was bookmarked.

Note: Make sure you keep a backup of all your files so you won’t have to worry as much should anything happen to your files. This is so you can prevent the loss of crucial data and avoid having to retrieve them, knowing there might be no guarantee of getting it all back.

Remember that organizing and managing your market research data is just as important as analyzing and drawing conclusions. Every stage plays an important part in the success of your market research and thus should be given proper attention and dealt with thoroughly.

Manage Your Media Files Better with Civicom Glide Central®

Organize and showcase the best of your research data with Glide Central®. This video curation tool solves organizational pain points when handling video, audio, and transcripts gathered from IDIs and focus groups. Develop tags for keywords, generate human or automated transcripts, make video clips, and create storyboards. Highlight key insights from your project and learn more about our media curation features.