Top 8 Ways to Gain Insight From Your Customers and Grow Your Business

Understanding Consumer Insight

The world of marketing revolves around its customers and their satisfaction. Grasping customer insights is the crucial aspect of formulating an effective marketing campaign. While traditional marketing focuses on a larger target audience, the advent of digital marketing has made the entire process a little more complex. For a digital marketing campaign to be successful, marketing needs to focus on minute customer details. Understanding the way an audience reacts, feels, needs, or behaves around a product is Customer Insight.

Interpreting consumer behavior helps develop a digital marketing strategy that focuses on certain behavioral aspects of the consumer, thus increasing the chances of being noticed by the target audiences. Adapting specific techniques and features into your digital marketing strategy also helps enhance the conversion rates, thus increasing your sales and revenues.

Importance of Customer Insights for Your Business

In case you are wondering about all the hullabaloo surrounding customer insights, let us explain how interpreting customer insights help you and your business grow.

• Provide Better Consumer Support – Understanding the needs and requirements of your customer helps you understand what makes them happy. It further enhances the way you provide support to your customers. Better and prompt customer support, on the platform of their choice, is a sure-shot way of satisfying your clients. Did you know that satisfied clients tend to always come back for more purchases? It builds a brand loyalty of sorts, helping you solidify your customer base, thus giving your sales a huge push.
• Enhanced Consumer Experience – Consumers these days have become quite demanding and need to be engaged with care. Consumers need to interact with the brand or the product to solidify their relationship with it. To this end, businesses are required to cater to their needs in a way that the overall consumer experience with the brand – from surfing to shopping to post-sales – is enhanced. A better consumer engagement with your business results in a long-term relationship increasing the chances of conversion and improving the overall brand image.
• Optimize a Product or Service – Businesses are constantly on the lookout to develop a new offering or service for their customers. However, what is a way of knowing if that particular offering, product, or service will be acceptable to the consumers? To develop a product, optimize an already existing product, or create new services, businesses need to understand what is it that customers require. By way of using certain methods, that we will be discussing further in the article, businesses can determine the exact product and how the customers need it. This helps develop a product that will be in demand from the very day of its conception. Providing the customers with an exact product will ensure that you have customers from the very first day of launching the product.
• Create a Brand Reputation – Establishing a positive brand reputation is one of the main aspects of marketing. Customer insights are critical in identifying if the projected brand image matches the perceived brand image. When a brand gets associated with a negative image, businesses that are actively interpreting consumer insight can make timely changes in their marketing strategy to bring about a change in customer perception.
• Informed Marketing Decisions – By staying abreast of the habits of the consumers, the ongoing trends, and future developments, businesses can take crucial strategic decisions related to product development, marketing strategies, mergers and acquisitions, and other developmental areas. Staying informed helps businesses develop or improve based on customer feedback.

8 Ways of Getting Consumer Insights

Customers these days have become smarter. No customer indulges in impulsive shopping these days. The customers decide to make a purchase only after carefully examining all aspects of the brand by reading reviews, checking websites, browsing policies, comparing with competitors, etc. In such a scenario, what makes you stand apart?

Marketing your brand in the right way, providing interactive customer-brand engagement, better products, and services, better communications with the customers by proactively answering all queries, etc are a few ways for businesses to establish a bond of trust with the consumers. However, it is a two-way process. The only way that businesses can provide consumers with exactly what customers want is when the customers tell them about their needs and requirements. Interpreting customer insights is one of the keys to a thriving, consumer-happy business.

Mentioned below are eight simple ways that help you get customer insight, thereby helping you grow your business.

1. 1) Personalized approach –

It is a proven point that personalized communications always help your customers feel connected with your brand. For instance, when a new customer joins your community, send a personalized email to them welcoming them onward signed off by the name of the company CEO or brand ambassador. It helps the consumer feel welcomed and creates a bond of trust with the brand.

Research proves that sending emails relevant to the consumer choices and past purchases gets more clicks than sending randomized emails. Therefore, regularly mailing the consumers using their first names, sending customized messages based on their past purchases, ongoing discounts, new launches, etc help initiate a sense of familiarity with the consumers enhancing their overall experience.

1. 2) Consumer Surveys –

One of the simplest ways of getting consumer insights is by asking consumers to take a short feedback survey. Consumers of the modern age are more than willing to participate in such surveys or provide feedback to you. In most cases, platforms such as Amazon or other marketplaces always ask for consumer feedback post the purchase. Reading this feedback will help you understand which aspect of the product to work on better. Further, businesses operating through standalone websites or portals can also ask customers for feedback regarding their products.

Keep in mind that when asking for consumer feedback, it is always best to ask in quantitative terms (rating or scales). Most consumers reply to feedback where they only have to select quantitative options rather than where they have to type out their answers.

While there is software that helps businesses develop surveys, online surveys are one of the best ways of asking for customer feedback. Several platforms offer customized or ready templates for quickly creating and sending surveys to your consumers. For instance, Google Forms, Got Incite, etc are a few online survey creator platforms. Using these survey platforms benefits you in three ways: First, they are free of cost or come at a nominal price. Second, they are effortless to use. Lastly, they auto-analyze the results of the responses you get from your surveys.

Got Incite, for instance, helps you create your survey. Got Incite provides you with several question types (multiple choice, scale-based, rating-based, text-based, etc), condition-based questions, and much more, while also helping you analyze the results in several categories. You also get the option to decide how to send the survey to your customers – through text or email. You can upload your entire consumer database and send all consumers the survey with a simple click. You also get the option to add single consumers and send them the survey link individually.

1. 3) Social Media Listening –

An emerging trend, Social Listening accounts to brands keeping an eye open for any social media discussions regarding your product. Establishing tracking cookies and bots to track conversations is one of the newest ways of making your presence felt even before the consumer realizes it. Have you ever wondered how the moment you send a chat to your friend regarding a product, say toothpaste? The next moment all the web pages you visit or surf online, start showing you advertisements for toothpaste? It is uncanny how when you look up a product on a website shows up as an advertisement on the next page. It is all attributed to social listening. With you listening to your consumer’s social media conversations, search history, keyword history, etc, you can showcase your product at the very beginning of the consumer funnel or the decision-making process.

1. 4) Creating Consumer Profile

Another way of getting consumer insights is by creating consumer profiles and segmenting. Profiling consumers help in sending better-personalized communication to the consumers, thereby increasing the chances of being converted in real-time. To provide consumers with a personalized approach, you need to collect customer information such as past preferences, browsing history on your website, products that got clicked on, purchase history, if any, etc. All these can easily be tracked using cookies and tracking bots that come embedded with your website or mobile applications. Further, if a consumer registers with you to receive regular communication, you can also get insight into details such as gender, demographics, age, etc. It helps send even more structured and personalized communication content to the consumers, enhancing the overall consumer experience.

1. 5) Holding Contests

Contests, where there is some prize (preferably an experience with your product), are always a great way of interacting with your consumers, collecting information regarding them, and interpreting their decision-making process. By registering for the contest, you get a database of interested customers. This database provides all the central details concerning your consumers, such as age, gender, location, job profile, education profile, family profile, etc, depending on how much you need and what you ask. These demographical factors help interpret your customers and develop suitable products, brand image, services, or marketing strategies to suit your purpose.

1. 6) Hosting Events

Hosting events in a community is a sure-shot way of getting noticed by the consumers within that society. It also helps build a database of consumers interested in your brand. At any event hosted by a business, most people who visit will be filling out a visitor form or provide some feedback (you have to ask them for it, preferably at the time of their exit). This feedback is pivotal for you to identify the needs of the consumers. The consumer details as well that are provided to you at these events help you segment your clientele, thereby enabling you to understand your consumer better and create a powerful marketing strategy.

1. 7) Virtual Tours of Products or Facilities

Consumers love various ways of interacting with brands or learning how brands develop their products. These virtual tours of your facilities or products also help educate the consumers regarding your brand, the values they imbibe, and the principles they stand for. Similarly, this being a two-way process, you get to interact with your consumers, asking the consumers about their needs and requirements, their expectations from the brand, their feedback, etc. Such interactive sessions are influential in creating a positive brand image of your business while providing you with valuable consumer insights at the same time.

1. 8) Consumer Reviews

It is one of the most critical ways to get essential consumer insights. Reviews of your product are the most genuine feedback you can get from your consumers. This feedback helps become a deciding factor for new consumers while making their purchases. The point to understand is that new consumers always depend on reviews before deciding whether to make a particular purchase or not. More positive reviews would mean more purchases as the new consumer would trust your brand better. Customer Reviews are also great to understand if the direction of your marketing strategy, product development, or service is correct. Negative reviews are bitter but help highlight central problems within your business processes, thereby giving you a chance to improve these problems. By acknowledging the negative reviews, your consumers get a sense of being valued, thereby reversing their negative experience to a fairly pleasant one.

Finally…

Understand your consumer at the granular level to understand how you can be there for your consumer at every point of the customer journey. It helps make your brand trustworthy in the eyes of the consumers, increasing their brand loyalty. Understand that loyal consumers mean sure-shot and repeat purchases. The key to any successful business is a base of loyal clientele. Beating the competition and creating value can be achieved only by understanding your consumers in the very best way that you can.

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