We’ve all likely heard the phrase, the customer is always right! It is indeed a fact since consumers can make or break a brand, despite great marketing or branding efforts. That is why it becomes important to understand what your consumer’s needs and wants are.
Although here comes the question, how can one figure out the needs and wants of the consumer? A lot of times, marketers develop a marketing strategy based on their own assumptions about the market. But it does not work all the time (rather, most of the time!).
Thankfully, people have started following consumer data and developing strategies accordingly.
Unfortunately, just having the data with you is not enough. Even though data is a piece of very useful information about consumers; in the end, it is a bunch of numbers and statistics. When your data needs a ‘human touch’, consumer insights come to your rescue!
In this article, let’s understand what consumer insights are and 6 amazing ways to develop them.
Table of contents
- What Are Consumer Insights?
- Why Brands Need It?
- 6 Ways To Develop Consumer Insights
- Take A Direct Feedback
- See And Analyze The Sentiments
- Use A Chatbot
- Behavioural Data Collected By Softwares
- A/B Testing
- Use Third-party Data
What Are Consumer Insights?
According to Wikipedia, ”A consumer insight, is an interpretation of trends in human behaviors which aims to increase the effectiveness of a product or service for the consumer, as well as increase sales for the financial benefit of those provisioning the product or service.”
Here, human interpretation means the conversion of the numerical and statistical data into a descriptive one, considering ‘why’ you’re not getting enough conversions and ‘what’ exactly is stopping your consumers from going ahead.
Here, the mixture of qualitative and quantitative data is important. Quantitative data is statistical and numerical data gathered and analyzed, whereas qualitative data is directly gathered by the customer; for example, feedback.
Why Do Brands Need It?
Let’s take Nokia as an example. Nokia was once a market leader in the mobile phone industry. Nokia was quite confident about its technology and marketing efforts. So, they stopped innovating themselves and continued with their handful of techniques and strategies.
By that time, technology and consumer demands had changed but Nokia’s ideations remained stagnant. Other mobile companies like Samsung saw the opportunity and launched ‘smartphones’ across the world. Nokia failed to listen to understand the needs of their consumers and they failed in coping with the situation. This is why always being updated about consumer insights is important.
Don’t forget to learn how consumer insights amplify marketing efforts.
There are ways to gather this data and build powerful consumer insights. Now, let’s have a look at the 6 ways to develop a powerful consumer insight.
6 Ways To Develop Consumer Insights
1. Take A Direct Feedback
Consumer feedback is one of the easiest and most effective ways of developing consumer insights. Consumer surveys and interactive questionnaires can help you get-to-the-point information about every aspect of the consumer’s experience using your products.
The advantage of direct feedback is that you can get a lot of information about what consumers feel about your product or service and implement them accordingly.
2. Observe And Analyze The Sentiments
If you feel most of the consumers may not open up the direct feedback, there is another option. Customer sentiment surveys are designed to give a symbolic reaction or feedback. Some of the examples are ‘star rating scale’ or ‘reactions’ on Facebook or Net Promoter Score (NPS).
The advantage here is that since this kind of survey is objective. This makes the chances of getting accurate feedback higher.
3. Use A Chatbot
If your website is big (filled with so many categories and options to search about) and people are finding it difficult to reach their desired destination on the website, you should think about installing a chatbot.
Most of the time you get valuable data about a particular customer through chatting, which is a prime advantage. But, your chatbot should not seem artificial or annoying to the visitor.
4. Behavioural Data Collected By Software
Website analytics are always helpful in providing accurate data about consumers. They tell you about the consumer’s interaction with your business’ content, product, or services in detail.
Analytics software such as Google Analytics, heat mapping tools such as Contentsquare, and much more software can help you to get accurate and useful behavioral data for you will be able to build powerful consumer insights.
5. A/B Testing
A/B testing helps you in getting information about the prominent places in the advertisement, where most people concentrate. Here, you can use it to see how visitors feel and react to the website, and how easy visitors find it to use.
By using the A/B testing method, you can test two different versions of your website and you can draw conclusions according to the response of the visitors to both versions.
6. Use Third-Party Data
If you don’t have a large amount of consumer feedback and you need it, then borrowing the data from marketing research done by larger organizations would be a great idea.
This data can help you in drawing better consumer insights. It can help you understand the problems of the consumers regarding the product or services and accordingly, you can develop a new marketing strategy or campaign and can improve your after-sales services.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, getting the correct data and drawing accurate consumer insights through it is a quite complex job. But if you do it properly, you can easily accelerate your growth. Using two or three of them collectively can help you in getting 360-degree information. These are the ways to build and improve your consumer insights scales.
Always remember one thing, behavioral trends can change frequently so you will have to be aware to stay updated.