When it comes to digital marketing, we have all heard the term consumer insights used everywhere, but what are consumer insights, and how do they help a brand build a digital strategy? Let’s start with the basics and deep dive into how it can help to strategize marketing efforts.
So, what exactly is consumer insight? And, why is it so important?
Consumer insight is an understanding of trends in customer behavior, and data such as needs and frustrations, which aims to increase the effectiveness of a product or service. In other words, it is an in-depth understanding of your customers and their activities aligned with your brand, for example, browsing history, campaign response patterns, demographics, and so on.
It is essential for brands to conduct comprehensive research about their consumer insights; behaviours, trends, needs, and patterns, to be able to invest in highly personalized marketing efforts to improve the customer experience, helping to build loyalty and relationships. Additionally, understanding customer behavior, and why they favour certain decisions will help a brand in optimizing the customer journey and make specific decisions about the marketing efforts, and in turn, increase profitability.
So, how do you gather consumer insights?
Customer Surveys
One of the primary methods used to collect consumer data is by asking them to complete surveys and this can be integrated into different stages of the customer journey. For example, when they subscribe to an email listing, they may receive periodical surveys regarding their experience with the product or service. Similarly, when they unsubscribe from an email listing, a pop-up survey can be used to deduce information about the reason for unsubscribing. Surveys provide brands with the opportunity to gain direct information about their customers with minimal effort and limitations.
Focus groups
Focus groups are a way for brands to get in-depth responses from a small group of selected individuals from the consumer pool, who will give detailed responses about their decisions, why they favour the brand and their customer journey experience. It is also possible for the brand representative to have in-depth conversations with the consumer group to be able to derive more information. However, to ensure a representative group, it is recommended to include a wide range of people from the consumer pool, which will include new customers, loyal customers, and churned customers.
Behaviour Data
This data is generated based on how the customers are interacting and behave with a brand. This can include metrics such as page views, downloads, email sign-ups, and other important user actions. It is possible and most common to track these interactions using the brand’s website or social media analyzing tools. Once the data is analyzed, it will provide information and insights about the type of communication and marketing strategies that influence customers to take action or the ones that prevent them from taking an action.
Now, how exactly can consumer insights help brands to develop a digital strategy?
Streamlined communication with your target audience
As digital marketing continues to evolve, customers are increasingly consuming different types of content. Therefore, it is important to be able to provide your customers with relevant content that aligns and drives customers towards the brand. Through understanding consumer insights, you will have an understanding of who your customers are, what they are looking for, and how they want to be engaged with, and will be more likely to build marketing strategies and messages that provide highly streamlined, tailored, and a personalized communication style in every customer interaction.
Optimize your customer journey
By getting a definitive understanding of your consumers, their motivation and intention at each touchpoint, what they think is and isn’t important, the elements that are driving them towards and away from your brand, as a brand, you will be able to optimize a customer’s journey and their end-to-end experience. For example, if you notice your customers are dropping out at the checkout page, this could indicate that your content is good, but the check-out experience is not. Therefore, as a brand, you can work on improving and optimizing your checkout page so it’s user-friendly and makes sense for the customer.
Increase brand awareness
For a brand to become successful digitally, it has to stand out from the crowd. So, it is crucial to build strong brand awareness amongst the target audience. To be able to do so efficiently, it is important to consider what the customers are looking for, and essentially, what type of content they want to see and engage with. By gathering consumer insights through behavior data, it is possible to deduce information about the target audience, what type of content they are interacting the most with, and what they are turning away from. Therefore, it becomes easier to understand how to leverage these guidelines to create content that increases awareness.
Strengthen your customer persona
Identifying and creating a detailed ideal buyer persona is an inevitable part of strategizing the digital strategy of any brand, service, or product. Consumer insights help to refine a brand’s customer persona in a few ways. Customer trends and patterns can be seen to continuously evolve with time, increased competition, and increased consumption of content. So, having an understanding of relevant consumer insights through means such as analyzing buying habits, sentiment analysis, and behavioral patterns will help the brand gain an understanding of how customer patterns are changing and provide new information about your customers, which can be used to continuously improve and revise the customer persona of the brand, which in turn can be used to strategize marketing efforts.
Now, you know about consumer insights and how they can contribute to a brand’s digital space, be sure to do in-depth research into the ‘think and feel’ of your customers at different touchpoints to create an effective digital marketing strategy.