A successful business is all about making smarter decisions. But how do business owners make smart decisions? 

Your one-line answer is: By using consumer Insights and data analytics.

What are Consumer Insights?

Consumer insights is a detailed data interpretation of your audiences’ needs and wants. Successful companies heavily rely on consumer insights to gain an in-depth understanding of their customer base. It helps them improve the overall customer experience and in devising better marketing strategies over time. 

The main goal of companies is to make more profits by increasing sales. When consumer insights are used correctly, it can help companies interact with customers the way they want to be interacted with – increasing the customer satisfaction level multi-folds. 

Market Research vs Consumer Insights

Market research is gathering general information about the customers and the relevant industrial markets. Market research is essential to get an idea about market size, needs, and competitors. 

Market research can identify how existing and potential customers view your business. This is powerful information to have when completing your marketing strategy. Market research significantly reduces the risks associated with making key business decisions.

Consumer insights also serve the same purpose but you get very focused results. Consumer insights give you market intelligence along with recommended actions that help you make effective decisions. 

In a nutshell, market research gives you data but consumer insights give you a whole package consisting of data, analysis and portrayal.

Why do you need Consumer Insights?

What do successful companies have in common? Meaningful insights from their customer base. 

Gut instincts don’t always work and there is a high risk of wasting the company’s valuable resources. When you base your decisions on meaningful insights gathered from your target audience, there are higher chances that you’ll reach your target goals efficiently and effectively. 

If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own.

Henry Ford

We have compiled five strong reasons to emphasize more on the importance of consumer insights. 

To improve the customer journey

Customer journey is a complete experience that a customer has with your company. It is the sum of all customer interactions that take place across many different channels, devices and touchpoints.

The success of any business is heavily dependent on the number of satisfied customers it has. Companies need to keep improving their customer journey and deliver excellent customer experiences across all the major touchpoints in the customer journey to increase the customer satisfaction level. 

Knowing how your customers feel about the customer journey is the best way to proceed to make improvements. Since customers are the ones who experience the journey firsthand, insights coming directly from them will prove to be the most valuable in terms of making improvements and bringing innovations. 

Listening empowers you to learn from your customers in order to create ever-improving experiences for them. This way, they can associate their trust and loyalty with you. 

To personalise the customer experience

Consumer insights help you identify the gaps in customer expectations and actual customer experience. Relying on the insights coming directly from customers help you understand them better and consequently, serve them better. 

Personalisation, in this digital age, is a key element in increasing and satisfying the customer base. It allows a company to segment its consumers and target them accordingly. With advancing Artificial Intelligence, it’s no big secret how Google, Facebook, Youtube, and other tech giants thrive on user data. They simply make use of the data points and personalise the entire experience that gives users immense satisfaction. 

Personalization has revolutionized Customer Experience. By relying on consumer insights, you can understand consumer behavior and interest, and better be able to personalise user experience. 

To market to the right people

Business is all about acquiring and retaining customers. But here are some questions that may arise before you begin attracting new customers:

Consumer insights are highly needed to answer these questions and more. Before marketing, you need to understand your target audience and its interests so that your marketing efforts prove fruitful. 

To stay ahead of the competition

Businesses with quality data and analysis are more likely to succeed. They rely on consumer insights that tell them what’s happening in the market and why it’s happening. This allows them to keep making changes to their business and they keep up with the changing market trends.

Hence, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that consumer insights help us in analysing competition and the emerging trends in the market. Keeping up with those trends increases customer satisfaction, retention and overall brand image. All of this translates into you having a better place in the market than that of competitors. 

To increase profitability 

Consumer insights help you make informed decisions and save you lots and lots of money that would otherwise be spent on futile efforts. 

With correct analysis and narrative, you’ll know where to spend, how much to spend and what results to expect. With better decisions, your campaigns and strategies would become more effective and efficient resulting in increased profitability. 

Top 4 Tools to Gain Consumer Insights

At this digital age, data is present everywhere. It’s upon us to decide what data to pick and what sources to get that from.Here’s a list of four definitive tools that will transform your journey to create strategies that will convert. 

Google Trends

Google Trends is an excellent place to start exploring your consumer interests. It helps you compare the search volume for different keywords. For example, here in the image below, we can see that more people are interested in learning to make pizzas than burgers. 

P.s If you create cooking tutorials, you now know that your “How to make a pizza” video will get more views 😉

Youtube Analytics

Youtube Analytics is a great tool to use to increase conversion from Youtube videos. It has many amazing features but our favorite is the one which allows you to see the demographics of your viewers. This helps you create more personalised content that would increase your viewership. 

Next, it allows you to see viewer engagement with the video playing so you can see how many viewers watched your video till the end. It also shows the point at which your customers abandoned the video. This way, you might get to know what caused your audience to stop watching the video and also help you in ad placement.

Facebook Insights

With Facebook Insights, you can see how many times your page has been viewed, the number of people who saw your posts and impressions. 

Apart from organic reach, Facebook insights also gives you an idea of how your paid adverts are doing. To top all of it, Facebook gives you an option to export all of your page insights so that you can use it for future reference.

 It has numerous other features and you can explore all of them here. 

GroHawk

GroHawk is essentially an automated customer feedback system that lets you hear what your clients are saying about you in real-time and act accordingly.

The types of insights that GroHawk provides enables you to provide excellent customer experiences; each tailored to meet the client’s specific needs. 

How to choose the right tool to gain consumer insights?

There’s no one-size-fits-all rule that applies when it comes to choosing a consumer insight tool. In order to get the best fit for your business, you need to understand what your business concerns are. 

For example, if you have an existing product, you might need to know how many of your customers are happy using it or what further improvements they might need to see? 

Similarly, If you’re developing a product, you might need to survey your target audience for their preferences.

In essence, you need to develop the questions that you want answers to, and then move on to look for tools that may help you answer those questions. Here are some of the questions that most businesses need answers to:

Gain valuable Consumer Insights with GroHawk

GroHawk is a one-stop solution to collect customer feedback and to use the insights to grow your business. 

Consumer insights can come directly through many channels. Sales data, surveys, interviews, and online data – every platform has data at its disposal. The best that you can get is the words coming directly from the person whom you intend to serve to i.e. customers. . 

GroHawk lets you explore the untapped potential in your business by listening to your customers. After all, good consumer insights will lead you to create those wow moments that glue your customers to you for eternity.