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How to use consumer insights to elevate your marketing strategy?

How to use consumer insights to elevate your marketing strategy

In this article we will review:

Consumer insights are the fuel that keeps brands running. A marketing strategy that actual customers do not guide rarely bears fruit. The first step is to listen in on brand-related conversations. Consumer insights assist brands in attracting customers and improving brand image.

Marketing ought to be a two-way street. Instead of taking a top-down approach, it is critical to listen to your customers for you to meet their needs and offer experiences that tick all of their boxes. As you get to know your customers, you will gain actionable consumer insights. This will put you in a much better position to serve them more of what they expect and less of what they don’t.

How can you anticipate customer needs and tailor your marketing strategy to their needs when you don’t know what they are? This is where consumer insights come in.

You can better serve your customers’ needs when you understand their behaviors and how they feel about your company. This enhances the customer experience. Not sure how to collect and apply customer insights? Continue reading to find out how.

What are consumer insights?

Consumer insights are marketing’s holy grail. They are the lessons that a company gets about its customers and how they think, feel, and interact with its brand. More importantly, consumer insights illuminate why they think and feel the way they do.

This provides businesses with intimate knowledge of their customers and allows them to communicate with their target audience much more effectively. Consumer insights will assist your company in increasing customer satisfaction and, as a result, customer retention, all of which translates to an increase in your Return on Investment (ROI).

3 keys to gaining meaningful consumer insights

The insights identified above do not come easy. You require the following keys to unlock actionable consumer insights to elevate your marketing strategy:

High-quality data

This is the foundation of valuable consumer insights. You won’t be able to gain valuable insights unless you have high-quality data. This data can be obtained through owned channels such as interactions with your own website, Mobile app, social media channels, marketing campaigns, or data on consumer activities obtained independently from qualified market research agencies.

Comprehensive analytics

After gathering high-quality data, you must make sense of it in order to extract insights and related meanings. To accomplish this, you will need a dedicated analytics team equipped with the appropriate analytical tools powered by artificial intelligence. This is the stage at which raw data is transformed into insights.

Customer segments

Dividing your audience into different customer segments is extremely beneficial because it provides you with ‘types’ of customers with varying needs, interests, and behaviors. This allows you to put your consumer insights to the test and see how they interact with different segments. Learn more from our Buyer Persona article.

Why are consumer insights important?

Consumer insights provide feedback on how you’re performing, allowing you to identify and address any issues before they harm your reputation.

You can also use consumer insights to improve your offerings and create new product lines. With an in-depth understanding of your customer’s behavior and needs, you can improve your products and services to outperform the competition.

Consumer insights don’t just make your marketing strategy effective, they also help you improve your business customer service and entire customer experience.

These insights will also assist you to understand how to improve your service quality and your business’ overall customer experience (CX).

Furthermore, insights into existing customers provide a more accurate picture of your target audience. This allows you to tailor your marketing to better appeal to your target audience.

Top methods of gathering consumer insights

Interacting with your customers allows you to gain a better understanding of what makes them tick.

Here’s how to get customer feedback to help you improve your marketing strategy.

1.    Feedback Questionnaires

Have you considered simply asking your customers what they think? According to a Hubspot report, 59% of businesses do this by surveying customers for feedback.

Surveys and feedback can be an excellent quality management system because they provide qualitative insights into your brand’s performance. You can use questionnaires to survey customers about your overall performance or to focus on specific services.

2.    Reviews

Ratings and reviews are an easy way for you and your customers to build brand trust and loyalty. Furthermore, according to a Harvard Business School study, consumer reviews have a direct impact on revenue.

Simply put, the more (and better) reviews you have, the better your chances of having a better business reputation, which leads to brand trust and loyalty, and eventually to more sales.

If you are not tracking reviews, you are not only missing out on a great opportunity to interact with your customers, but you are also missing out on customer insights that could potentially harm your reputation.

3.    Social media

Social media is an excellent platform for engaging with your audience in real-time. As a result, it’s one of your best resources for discovering and implementing consumer insights to boost your marketing efforts.

Plan your marketing strategy for success with Survey54

When people comment on your brand, you can learn more about them by clicking on their profile. You can also look for the communities with which they are associated. It will assist you in developing an understanding of their type of person and strategizing your marketing approach to attract them.

Consumer insights and marketing

Consumer insight research allows businesses to create informed consumer marketing strategies that help them achieve their goals more effectively and efficiently. It also enables brands to shift their focus away from mass marketing and toward personalized, tailored marketing. Brands can increase consumer engagement, conversions, and ROI by focusing and prioritizing in this manner.

Forward-thinking brands recognize the significance of placing the consumer at the center of their brand and marketing strategies. Unlocking the data available enables brands to make more informed decisions and be more targeted in their approach. This allows for more precise marketing, which increases marketing effectiveness and ROI.

This then leads to the next question;

How do consumer insights improve marketing strategy?

It allows for personalized messaging

According to report, more than three-quarters of consumers are dissatisfied with irrelevant marketing. Consumers want more relevance; they want businesses to know who they are, what they’re interested in, and when and how they want to be engaged. Personalization can provide this in every customer interaction. Brands can, therefore, tailor marketing messages with a better understanding of customer needs.

It enhances brand awareness among target audiences

Businesses want to distinguish themselves from the competition. And that is simply not possible unless strong brand awareness is achieved among the most relevant audience pools. Possibly, the most effective way to stand out is to provide an experience that these target audiences crave. In-depth consumer research makes it easier to understand what audiences want, how brands can meet these needs, and essentially, how to leverage this connection to increase campaign awareness.

It can aim at the most important groups

What constitutes an ‘important group’ will differ from one company to the next. Most businesses, however, will classify existing customers to be within this range. Forrester disclosed that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing one. Therefore, consumer insights can help brands learn more about what aspects of their marketing strategy initially drew and converted existing customers, allowing them to allocate more resources to high-performing areas.

It can assist brands in entering new markets with existing products

Investing in large-scale marketing campaigns can be a risky venture for companies looking to expand into new markets. Consumer insights can assist in mitigating this risk. By gathering early feedback from consumers, marketers can optimize their message and customize their strategy to ensure that campaigns are hitting the mark. It also ensures that they are resonating with the appropriate people, at the perfect time, and are not missing out on any potential opportunities that would otherwise have gone unnoticed.

Don’t be left behind

Investment in consumer insights is declining, and this growing trend of ignoring customer feedback is resulting in new business challenges such as uncertainty about where to innovate, an inability to categorize customers, and unfocused marketing and product development strategies. There are obvious benefits to investing in consumer insights, so why are so few businesses prioritizing this area?

Consumer insights are your best bet to hit targets with your marketing campaigns. They are also your secret weapon for figuring out how to improve your customer experience in various ways.

This is why businesses are encouraged to collaborate with an experienced insights partner, who can help remove some of the barriers to data collection and analysis while also ensuring valuable insights at every step of the way.

Need help tracking consumer insights in Africa? Contact Survey54 today.

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