4 min read
Marketing should be a two-way process. Instead of the traditional ‘top-down’ approach, it is vital to listen to your customers in order to meet their needs and provide experiences that tick all their boxes. By getting to know your customers, you will gain actionable consumer insights, and be much better placed to serve them more of what they want, and less of what they don’t.
What Are Consumer Insights?
Consumer insights are understanding that a business gains about consumers and how they think and feel. More importantly, consumer insights shed light on why they think and feel this way.
This gives companies an intimate knowledge of their customers, and helps them communicate with their audience much more effectively. If you know not only that a customer wants to buy a bright blue coat but also that they are doing so because they think spring colors suit them, you can recommend garments in other spring colorways.
Consumer insights will help your business improve customer satisfaction and hence boost customer retention, all of which will increase your return on investment (ROI).
What Does It Take to Gain Meaningful Consumer Insights?
Such insights do not come easy. Gaining actionable consumer insights requires the following:
- High-quality data
This is the cornerstone of meaningful consumer insights. Without high-quality data, you won’t draw worthwhile insights. This data can be through owned channels like interactions with your own website, app, social media channels, marketing campaigns and CRM, or third-party data on consumer activities on the wider web.
- Comprehensive analytics
Once you have gathered high-quality data, you need to make sense of it to extract the insights and discover what it is telling you. To do this you will need a dedicated analytics team armed with the right analytical tools driven by artificial intelligence.
- Customer segments
Dividing your audience into different customer segments is very useful, as it gives you ‘types’ of customer with different needs, interests and behaviors. This lets you test your consumer insights to see how they play with various segments.
What Is the Difference Between Market Research and Consumer Insights?
Consumer insights might sound a lot like market research, but the two are quite different.
Market research provides you with information on what is happening in the market. It helps define both business trends and consumer trends, to provide a snapshot of the current lie of the land.
Consumer insights take this step further. Rather than telling you what is happening, they tell you why it is happening. In other words, it recommends steps you can take to capitalize on the opportunities the data presents. Hence consumer insights are often referred to as actionable.
How to Amplify Your Marketing Efforts Using Consumer Insights
- Read your rivals
Apart from telling you what customers think about your brand and products, consumer insights can also reveal what they think of your competitors. This will show where you are meeting customer needs, and where you are losing out to your rivals, which is vital to helping your business evolve to capture a greater market share.
- Get personal
While many companies are still using mass marketing for services or products that are used by many, personalization has become a must for many industries, especially e-commerce, as the competition is getting tougher than ever.
Consumer insights enable brands to deliver personalized marketing and communication to different segments by understanding why people buy certain products and the reason behind their preferences, and therefore attract and retain customers.
- Improve the customer journey
Consumer insights help you map your customer journey. This will identify any gaps that need to be filled in order to improve the overall customer experience. Maybe you are not providing any post-purchase customer care, for example. In which case, you could launch a social media campaign prompting customers to post photos of themselves enjoying your product and sharing their feedback. This would boost customer engagement, helping retention.
Consumer insights are like market research 2.0. Employed correctly, they will help you elevate your marketing to be more compelling to both existing and new customers alike, giving you the edge to not only survive but flourish in a competitive field.
Need Help? We know it’s not easy to make sense of mountains of data and uncover the kind of insight that can help you craft a truly effective marketing campaign.
Don’t worry. This is exactly what we do, with the help of our powerful Data Science Platform powered by AI.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we can help you gain a more intimate knowledge of your customers, reach out today . We would love to help!
