August 15, 2020

Should You Be Tracking Customer Insights?

Consumer Insights 101. What are they and how do you use them?

Should You Be Tracking Customer Insights?
Molly Purcell

by Molly Purcell

Digital Marketing Specialist at GreenBook

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What is Customer Insights?

The practice of using available data to derive broader business insights for effective business decision-making by looking to the Why/What next? and not just the What?

A quick search of “Insights” will return many kinds of research insights. Here are a few definitions:

  • Actionable insights – originally appeared as a way to define insights that provide immediately useful recommendations for front-line decision making. However, the term is used so frequently that it may be used on insights that might not warrant the term, though they still might be valuable and worthwhile.
  • Robust Insights and Deep Insights – developed using consistent, sound research methodologies
  • Organic Insights – coming from observations of unprompted conversations or behaviour
  • Real-time Insights – available immediately, without a lag.

Customer insights is the practice of using available data from current or potential customers to support and guide brands to move more into the direction of consumer-centricity.

 

How are Customer Insights collected?

There are many reasons why a brand or company may want to implement a customer insights program. The method of data collection will likely depend on the reason behind the program. A brand wanting to know if there is room in the market for a potential new product is going to use different methodologies than a company collecting intelligence on their competition. Some examples courtesy of B2B International

  1. Market Entry and Market Expansion studies use surveys and interviews to ascertain how much demand there is for the product/service, how to best get products and services to market or how other companies have successfully entered and stayed in the market
  2. Market Assessment studies research published information such as annual reports and industry reports for industry details. They might also involve interviews with the acquisition targets to gauge their strategy, intentions, performance and characteristics
  3. Competitor Intelligence studies involve a wide variety of methods like; pricing research where researchers might trawl websites, price lists, and other sources of information for the prices of competitors’ products and services which is then benchmarked against their prices, search competitor websites for pages containing technical data sheets and staff credentials; or they may also interview customers about their current suppliers.
  4. Corporate Positioning studies typically result in the build of a competitive brand map, which uses satisfaction and perception scores provided by customers to statistically plot the relative strengths of competing companies against each other
  5. In Segmentation studies, the target audience is broken down into groups which the brand may decide to market to

 

The Key Metrics that are tracked in Customer Insights studies

  • The number of new customers gained in a month/quarter/year
  • The average lifetime value of a customer
  • The number of products per customers
  • The percentage of customers retained year over year

 

What kind of questions are best answered by Customer Insights surveys

  • Identifying the key strengths of a manufacturer, as well as areas for improvement
  • Evaluating whether customer expectations are being met, and determining how to exceed their expectations
  • Identifying understanding your brand differentiation against competitors
  • What are a customer’s needs in the growth areas being considered for a company?
  • What to do to keep ahead of the competition, obtain a first-mover advantage over the competition

 

The Benefits of Customer Insights

  • Recommend actions for effective decision making
  • Finds the story in the data
  • Benchmark against other organizations
  • Uses multiple data streams
  • Focus on future growth
  • Give access to dashboards etc
  • Marketing intelligence-based studies have a positive ROI

 

Table showing the Market Intelligence Return On Investment For Competitor Intelligence. The typical increase in revenue within 3 years is on the y axis, the typical cost of the study is on the x axis

Estimated ROI Of Market Intelligence Projects from B2B International

 

What Companies Usually Get Wrong About Customer Insights

Consumer insights is one of the most misunderstood departments in an organization. Ryan Barry, Chief Revenue Officer for Zappi identified seven challenges that Zappi has seen repeated in corporate Insights departments across all industries and geographies.

  1. Consumer Insights teams often work in silos and too often, Insights is called in only to green-light a decision that has already been taken, to tick a box to get through a gateway in development or to validate content so the marketing person doesn’t get fired.
  2. Customer Insights teams are not considered until late in the process, so every request from marketing and sales teams ends up being urgent and if you are busy running from imaginary fires, you don’t have time – or budget – to build a comprehensive process.
  3. Too much of your time is spent on making decks. From fixing vendor decks to customizing insights decks for disparate internal stakeholders, there are better ways to use consumer insights to inspire your colleagues to be more creative and build your brand.
  4. Salespeople are competing for your attention. Not only does this take up your valuable time with emails, cold calls and content to read but, when you do agree to take a pitch, you find that everyone is promising the holy trinity – their offer is faster cheaper and better – and it is hard to decipher where the value is.
  5. Juggling politics:  You want to change your ad tracking, but you can’t because some of the metrics are linked to remuneration in the marketing team. Your CEO has a pet project that you know that your customers will hate but you end up wasting time on because but you don’t have the specific market research data to back you up. All organizations are political, but politics shouldn’t be your job.
  6. Each time there is a requirement, you need a new project. So you’re busy writing briefs, reading RFPs and trying to choose between vendors, which only leaves you time to innovate tactically around the edges, rather than having an impact at a macro level across all stakeholder groups and being able to drive change in your company.
  7. The need for more decks, more projects, and more meetings takes up your working day, and probably your evening too. Occasionally you get to do the awesome work that you love – to finding out about what makes people tick, what occasions they buy your product, how they live and act in their homes – but most of the time you are playing catch up.

 

Additional Tips

Most Customer Insights departments would prefer to “spend their time focusing on understanding people and taking that knowledge to help growth strategy in their business.” Here are some way that companies can internally reframe Insights and get the most out of their employees

  • Think Programmatically – Ask yourself how you can build an Insights ecosystem that integrates stakeholders, vendors, and other partners and collates existing insights with new solutions to answer a business question?  Digitize and standardize your tools and to make it easy to compare data over time and delegate tasks as needed.
  • Use Modern Methodologies – We can’t just digitize old-world black-box methodologies, because they were created for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. Avoid building bloated surveys and narrow the focus of your surveys to answer your main question. Embrace mobile platforms and systems and don’t be afraid to run calibration exercises with vendors using your existing insights.
  • Build foresight – You probably already know a lot about your audience, what they like, what they respond to, and how to best connect with them. Collect these high-level insights and share them with your partners in marketing, creatives, and sales so they aren’t making the same mistakes over again.

 

Marketing is a business partner

When marketing and insights are well aligned, they work together seamlessly. Include marketing in the process of synthesizing the learning from insights projects to gain applicable insights and build deeper knowledge in the organization.

 

 

Our best resources for learning more about Customer Insights

Blog Articles

Customer Satisfaction Research Identifies Strategic Improvements for Food & Beverage Manufacturer

Enabling Better Business Decisions Through Real-Time Conversations

Is Market Research Ready For Data Diversity?

Developing an Omnichannel Consumer Decision Journey Strategy

Taking Care of Retailers In A Manufacturer Focused Research World

Measure Concept Engagement, Not Just Purchase Intentions

The Lost Craft of Insight Generation

An Insight By Any Other Name

Understanding Cultural Insights: The New Next Consumer Battleground

You Didn’t Enter Consumer Insights to be a Project Manager: Here’s What You Should be Doing All Day

 

Case Studies

Market Feasibility Study For Soft Drinks Segment

 

Webinars

[Webinar] The Why Behind the What: Using Customer Insights to Create More Relevant Content

[Webinar Recording] The Power of Real-Time Consumer Insights A Mobile Case Study

 

Find a company that specializes in Customer Insights

 

 

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careercompetitive intelligenceconsumer researchsegmentation

Disclaimer

The views, opinions, data, and methodologies expressed above are those of the contributor(s) and do not necessarily reflect or represent the official policies, positions, or beliefs of Greenbook.

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