Commonly referred to as CI, customer insight secrets to working for you is the intersection between the interests of the consumer and the features of a brand.
Their main purpose is to understand why the consumer cares for the brand as well as the underlying mindsets, moods, motivation, desires, and aspirations that trigger their attitude and actions. Successful businesses are the best to put customer insights to work.
A consumer insight can be more precisely defined as: “A non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, has the potential to change their behavior for mutual benefit”.
They are the understanding of your customers, based on their buying behavior, their experiences with you, their beliefs or their needs.
Consider: “Saying no saves you time in the future. Saying yes costs you time in the future. No is like a time credit. You can spend that block of time in the future. Yes is like a time debt. You have to repay that commitment at some point. No is a decision. Yes is a responsibility.”
When considering why convenience has become a key differentiator, the answer is right in our faces: We all have busy lives; we’re all pulled in multiple directions all day long. Given an alternative, does anyone want less convenience or to spend more time on their to-do list?
This idea isn’t really new. Corner markets and convenience stores aren’t just competing with the big-box superstores, they flourish. Why? The reason is in their names: They’re right where their customers are, and they’re convenient.
They are a multi-view of your customers derived from a strategic analysis of qualitative and quantitative data.
How customer insights help
Predict your customer’s movements.
Researching your customer you can identify patterns in their buying, learn about their business operation, including product lines and find out exactly what’s important to them.
You’ll also be able to build stronger relationships with your customers as your conversations will always be relevant to them.
Data will help make better business decisions
Data is becoming a valuable asset for almost every business. The data stored in your back office system and the information in your CRM tool will give you great insights into your customer.
The problem most businesses have is extracting the important chunks of information from all the ‘noise’ to give you the level of customer insight that you need.
Resolve ambiguity
Fully understand the customer journey across channels by using contextual information and artificial intelligence that matches customers with previously ambiguous activities and profiles.
Grade business predictions for better process integration and automation.
Create rich visualizations
Better understand the customer journey—individually or in the aggregate—by composing role-specific visualizations that bring together customer profiles, interactions, metrics, inferences, and predictions.
Define the metrics that matter to you and keep them up to date
Easily build visualizations and embed them into existing tools and business processes
Identify and take advantage of marketing opportunities by creating granular customer segmentation based on transactional and behavioral data, inferences, and insights.
Define dynamic segments based on a deep network of relationships
Use segments that are always up to date and based on complete customer journeys
Valuable example
Let’s use Dove as an example. Through extensive research and analysis, Dove uncovered that most women want to be admired for what’s on the inside rather than how they look on the outside.
This customer insight inspired the well-known Campaign for Real Beauty.
4 ways to use customer insights
Customer insights drive Persona development for successful marketing planning. Without a unique understanding of customers and markets, it’s just a guess.
Customer insights drive tactics. Understanding what is and isn’t relevant to an audience influences creative choices, design, and messaging.
Customer insights help you spend strategically. From media selection mix and channel selection to retail location decisions and product expansions. Even big brands don’t throw dollars at every channel and hope something sticks.
Large organizations need a shared understanding of customers to keep up with non-linear customer journeys.
How to find customer insights
Customer insights are found by looking at relevant data.
In the past, a lot of time, money and resources were needed to make sense of that data.
It is now possible for you the Marketer, the Researcher, the Sales Guy/Gal, the Executive, to instantly access interpreted data online, to discover insights and generate ideas.
We’ve picked out the top 7 customer-centric marketing tools to help you to better understand your customers.
YouTube Analytics
You may have posted a lot of videos on YouTube, but do you know who is watching them? Is it possible that your audience is totally different from what you expected?
YouTube users post an incredible 300 hours of video to YouTube every single minute (Source: unmetric.com) and its analytics can provide an amazing amount of customer insight.
How to define your audience on YouTube.
To find out who your real audience is, click on the ‘demographics tab’, here you’ll find information about the location and age of the people who watch your videos.
Once you know who your audience is, you will be able to produce more personalized content that caters to their needs and increases conversions.
The Retention Rate shows the average watch time for the video. It is important because Google uses the retention rate to assess whether viewers find your content interesting or not.
If your retention rate is high, your search rankings will also be high. If the average retention rate is low (under 25%), you should consider reducing the length of your videos.
Use Google’s Audience Retention Tool to Track Viewer Engagement
Google Surveys is another great tool for developing a clear understanding of who your customers are by conducting custom surveys to target specific audiences.
You can specify which data you want to collect from age, geography, gender, family structure to income in order to ensure that it’s relevant to your content and audience.
These focus groups are readily available. You get numerous results within a few days instead of a couple of results in weeks and they will be useful when you are writing your brief.
And they don’t cost much with pricing beginning at 10 cents per response.
Ask a question and Google will put that question out to the relevant audience.
Try Google Trends for Gaining in-depth Consumer Insights
Using Google Trends, you can confirm your assumptions about the interests of your audience.
If you are still trying to figure out which topics your audience might like, Google Trends can help.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the most popular analytics software. It tracks the traffic to your website along with the performance of various web pages.
Using Google Analytics you can also find out where your visitors are coming from, how much time they spend on the site, and their geographic distribution.
One of the best features of Google Analytics is their Goal Funnel
Goal Funnel is particularly important for marketers and retail sites. Set up a list of URLs that the customer clicks through when they complete a purchase.
This feature allows you to find out how many customers are going through the purchase process.
You will also be able to find out how many of them abandon the purchase at a certain stage. Using this information, you can adjust your strategies and make the buying experience easier.
Social Mention
This is a free tool that provides real-time analysis of social media. It organizes social media mentions of your brand into a single stream and includes hashtags, top keywords, and sites.
Social Mention is a hit with social media enthusiasts. More than 100 social networks are monitored by this tool. It is a great free listening tool available for marketers.
It gives an in-depth analysis of data and measures influence in four categories: sentiment, strength, passion, and reach.
Facebook audience insights
Audience Insights are different than Page Insights and report customer demographics by gender, age, relationship status, lifestyle, and job role. In addition, this tool reports the number of likes, purchase activity, and Facebook usage.
What the Data Tell You
A benefit of tracking an individual over time is that you can often cover a complete customer journey from the identification of a need to purchase.
And with statistical tools, you can use RET data to identify not only what most motivates customers to buy your brand but also how various touchpoints combine in a chain to influence the customers’ decisions.
Competitive analysis
You can also see how effective your touchpoints are at driving behavior and shaping attitudes relative to the touchpoints of your competitors.
A good way to present this is with a touchpoint impact matrix, shown in the exhibit “Checking Out the Competition,” which compares the performance of five touchpoints of two UK cell-phone-network providers.
From this comparison, one can see that although people like Brand A’s TV and newspaper advertisements, these have only a limited impact on purchases, because many consumers are also hearing negative comments from current customers who are unhappy with coverage, packages, and responsiveness.
Brand B has less word of mouth, but what word of mouth does occur is very positive.
It is clear that Brand A’s communications spending is going to be largely wasted until the company fixes its service problems, so it would do better to divert investment from marketing into service and operations.
Note that you can apply versions of this technique to outcomes other than purchase, such as overall brand perception or willingness to recommend the brand.
Taking Real-Time Action
Insights gained from RET can be acted on immediately—a great advantage in new product launches or marketing campaigns conducted in fast-changing environments.
Energizer’s introduction of a new Schick Hydro razor in Germany was intended to bring about a step-change in brand performance.
The launch team used RET during the 12-week campaign, adapting its strategies along the way on the basis of feedback gathered. An analysis of the first few weeks of data revealed several opportunities for improvement:
For example, shifting the focus from TV advertising to online spending would increase purchases among the young male target market.
The bottom line
Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. For example, you may not be able to imagine sequences of images very well, but you may excel in imagining other modalities such as smell, touch, and sound.
You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings. DO not feel compelled to stay within any single modality but make your visualizations and imagination vivid and rich by including numerous modalities.
Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.
Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Customer engagement improvements are worth the effort.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas to make your customer experiences better.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to improving your continuous learning for yourself and your team?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on customer insight from our Library:
Customer Experience Optimization … 10 Employee Actions that Lower It
Random Acts of Kindness for Customer Experience Improvements
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
