Consumer insights are interpretations used by businesses to gain further understanding into how their audiences think, feel and act. It shows what consumers want and their purchasing decisions allowing us to improve product and market fits. Insights through data and analytics allow brands to understand customers and become empowered to create meaningful engagement. You can transform bespoke insight into branding, content marketing or product and service development strategies. Data collection has become increasingly challenging; however, user data can be collected over multiple channels such as apps, email, and web browsing. These methods of collecting insights give you the chance to truly understand your customers and grow your business, also identifying opportunities in the market. Here at Free4you, we understand the importance of gaining insights and have established a bespoke process that focuses on individual experiences. Our insight process generates meaningful and qualifiable results, this gains product, consumer, and retailer insights. We ask the questions that matter and deliver insights with tangible outputs.
Definition
Consumer insight can be defined as, “a non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, has the potential to change their behaviour for mutual benefit”. They become an interpretation of human behaviours, aiming to increase the effectiveness of products and brands for consumers. You need to turn insights into action, capturing data and giving insight into user activity.
Recognising Insights
How do you know when you have an insight? You need to consider; does it reveal something about your consumer and capture how they feel? Does it challenge the company or brand in new ways? These insights can help transform organic growth that can be scaled and repeated to predict long-term results. Insight takes place when people recognise relationships or associations between objects and actions that can help them solve new problems. Powerful insights are actionable and can be recognised when they connect with consumers on an emotional level. These insights re-examine existing conventions and challenges.
Insights-Driven Marketing
The value of data and analytics is within their ability to deliver insights and allow us to digest data. These insights need to be actionable and prescriptive to inform future brand paths. Customer insight becomes the first step towards one-to-one customers relationships that are mutually beneficial. Feedback is sometimes described as marketing insights; however, marketing insights need to be based on perception.
Marketing Communications
If you understand your customers, you can create more effective marketing campaigns and refine communication strategies. Customer insights help drive marketing tactics, understanding what is relevant and irrelevant to your audience. Insights should influence creative choices and drive meaningful creativity and positive change. Insights should also impact channel-specific initiatives such as Facebook audiences and marketing techniques such as funnel creation. Different audiences need to be communicated to in different ways and engaged, therefore, insights can help design funnels and customise them more effectively.
Personalised Marketing
Consumer insight research techniques gain usable data about your customer base and market, these might be about customer retention. You should personalise your marketing content to help it reach a greater audience and appeal to different consumers. A 2018 survey by RichRelevant found that 80% of respondents want personalisation from retailers. This is because it creates a stronger relationship that is more aimed towards consumers.
Growing Business
Insights aim to benefit both business and customer, using knowledge to reach target customer bases’ needs and providing an income stream. This helps growth potential, uncovering sources of growth. It also helps maintain products and brands, informing the core truth of your brand strategy and work. Customer insights can help focus on the ROI of implementing changes for past, current and future insights. By maximising ROI, insights help direct business actions that cut costs, improving results and optimisation. You can also increase revenues as you better influence response rates, time of purchase, average order value and reorders. Actionable insights come from what data you have collected, and your business can use it to improve an objective. It can lead to better inventory planning for smaller inventories and fewer markdowns. This can be achieved through predictive modelling, by focusing on looking at consumers’ browsing history, purchase patterns and demographics.
Solving Problems
Businesses should approach their customers from an insight’s perspective, connecting head to heart knowledge. Insights reveal human behaviours or phenomena and point to solutions or ideas. They are also grounded in human needs and desires and lead to ideas that create value in people’s lives. These solve real problems and create new customers, inspiring action by providing a clear target to aim for.
Customer Perspectives
Insights require us to shift perspective and view problems in alternative ways to reach solutions. Having an insight “moves us from a state of not knowing how to solve a problem to a state of knowing how to solve it”. They are patterns in observations to give the understanding to cause and effect, actively looking for patterns in data and information. You need to understand the motivations that drive customer’s actions; this becomes fundamental to insight definition. People are motivated by changes in tensions; therefore, you should look for tensions within the physiological, emotional cognitive and environmental to inform insights.
Driving Customer Loyalty
You can help build customer loyalty by understanding customers’ experiences and what drives their purchasing decisions. Understanding customer’s needs are essential to ensure that your business is future proof. This empowers you to learn and communicate with customers and create ever-improving experiences, better user experience and customer journeys. Communicating to consumers in a personalised way adds value that leads to strong customer loyalty and long-term customers. Therefore, by maximising customer lifetime value, you will gain higher revenue. Leveraging consumer insights can help create more effective experiences for customers, becoming a fundamental part of your product and service development strategy.
Market Competition
Consumer insights assist in analysing your competition, allowing you to check whether you are the market leader within your industry. Insights, therefore, help you stay ahead of the competition by looking at what consumers are saying about your products. Insight lasts and requires a competitive edge of products or services, allowing you to answer customers’ fundamental needs. You need to look at which paths customers take, what they buy, whether they leave for a competitor’s products, where you stand within your competition and where customers are coming from. This can help you expand into new markets or leave underperforming markets, impacting areas of operation and sales performance. You can look at new markets to consider entering and what areas are not delivering enough return on investment.
Data and Analytics
Data and analytics help deliver understanding or insights into your user base, revealing actions you can take. These insights are obtained through analytics and data, allowing you to interpret different types of data. The more data businesses collect, the more likely they will collect actionable customer insights to grow in the long run.
New Products
Insights can help design new products or services, promote specialised deals or market existing businesses. Gaining qualitative insights from target audiences is essential for any brand before launch. It also provides new insights into customers styles and needs, to help with future product development. At Free4you, we place products in targeted customers hands pre-launch; this helps gain a true understanding of what matters to customers. It also bridges the gap between consumer attitudes behaviour and sales, helping you understand how to activate your brand. If you’re launching NPD or distributing more of an existing brand, our custom insights and retailer-specific data helps listing propositions to gain valuable space on-shelf. We help assist brands to secure national listings with major national retailers.
Consumer Activity
An insight statement becomes a discovery of understanding and explains why something is happening the way it is. It observes behaviour and looks at what activity is driving it, allowing you to understand why the consumer is behaving in a certain way. It also gives you the chance to change or develop it. It becomes an important part of working out how we can help consumers achieve their goals. Insights come from observing human behaviour and reveal the shared values of a group, helping you refine personas and determine the best way to communicate with audiences.
Understanding Customers
Insights help businesses have a 360-degree customer view to understand customer behaviour and how customers think. Understanding product efficacy allows for key insight into how to position a brand. You need to understand your consumer demographics, behaviours and geographics. At Free4you, we provide specific data for each consumer of your brand to allow you to build a complete picture. This involves looking at data points including age, location, where they shop, family members, what label they use, how often they go to the gym and how often they use the product daily, plus thousands of other data points.
Customer Driven
Using data helps you understand customers so that every interaction demonstrates relevancy and emotional intelligence. Insights are classified as “a universal human truth” to tell you something unique about an audience. Understanding what customers do during every stage of the purchase decision journey helps you to make confident decisions.
Customer Journeys
Insight is a journey that takes the individual through the consumer’s situation, frustration, and future desires. These can help identify the unique buyers’ journey for your audience and each audience acts differently. It becomes a clear statement of what to approach next and how to deliver to customers. You need to gather information and have a target, asking people what they need, comparing trends and working towards sales and marketing goals. Customers’ needs evolve and change quickly so they need to have something new regularly that engages and interests them.
Conclusion
Insights create a bespoke process that focuses on individual consumer experiences, allowing us to learn about the full consumer journey. Here at Free4you, we work with brands to gain qualitative and quantitative insights that are directly from targeted audiences. This allows you to be ahead of the game with relevant insights for consumers, retailers, and competitors. We analyse social media, news, and data to provide a deeper consumer understanding. Our unique insight service is individually tailored to answer business and brand questions for marketing, market research, insight, and digital teams.
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