What are Consumer Insights and How to Discover Them? Examples & Tools

Businesses of all kinds do everything in their power to satisfy consumers. They are constantly searching for new ways to improve their products or services. What makes achieving this goal a lot easier? Consumer insights. Discovering and drawing conclusions from them makes meeting customers’ expectations much more successful.

Are you wondering how to read your customers’ minds to satisfy them? You need to master discovering consumer insights. In this article, I will do my best to show you:

• What are consumer insights?
• Why do we need customer insights in marketing?
• Examples of great consumer insights
• How to discover consumer insights?
• Consumer insights tools
• Conclusions

What are consumer insights?

Consumer insights reflect valuable information about your target audience – their characteristics, preferences, behaviors. They help you identify customers’ needs and better understand their pain points. So, you will learn more about your current and potential clients.

What can you do with those insights? With a deeper understanding of your clients, you will draw accurate conclusions. Then you will develop better products and services. For example, offer desired features and improve any inadequacies to satisfy your consumers and meet their needs.

To put it more simply – the more you know about your target audience (and the more you try to understand their motivations), the easier it is to create a solution that will be the answer to their issues.

The same goes for campaigns. The deeper you dig into your audience’s expectations, the easier it will be to create an advertisement that reaches them.

Why do we need customer insights in marketing?

My experience tells me, Marketers need to keep up with consumer insights. Knowing how your customers feel, as far as your products or campaigns are concerned, is very beneficial.

Personally, it’s hard to imagine working in the marketing department without knowing the target group. I wouldn’t understand to whom I address my actions.

We need consumer insights because:

• They help to understand who customers are, what are their needs, pain points, and preferences. This information may come in handy while developing products.
• They give you information about customers buying behaviors – why they buy your products, how your solution makes their lives easier, as well as how and where they buy it. Such customer insight helps you draw customer journey maps. It will tell how to reach your clients in the future, or what kind of campaigns you should target them.
• They help you get to know your target audience in order to successfully communicate with them. It will allow you to build strong relationships with them, gain their trust and loyalty. 
• They help you out with market research and competitor analysis. Knowing people’s feedback, and keeping in mind every suggestion allows you to grow, and stay ahead of your rivals.
• They enable you to improve your customer service. Knowing your clients can help boost your communication with them, and most likely, provide them with better help. It will also allow you to improve customer satisfaction and experience.

Examples of great consumer insights

One of my favorite campaigns, that have been created based on great customer insights (please don’t judge me, I am a woman) is the one started by Dove in 2004. 

What was the insight?

An indication that only 2% of women consider themselves beautiful.

What was the aim of the campaign?

To make women feel comfortable in the skin they are in, to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety.

The For Real Beauty campaign started already back in 2004 as a series of billboards and it turned out to be a huge success. 

Next, as a result, the campaign expanded into a series of television spots and viral videos. One of the most known videos of the campaign is Real Beauty Sketches, as it came across incredibly positive reactions among the public (especially women) and media. 

Let’s look at examples of consumer insights that I found online using the Brand24 tool. The following posts refer to popular companies. They could easily consider these opinions while developing their products or services. These kinds of suggestions are insights we are looking for!

As you can see, all of these tweets are posted by Uber Eats and Apple’s target audiences. They contain amazing insights, but it would be difficult for the clients to find these suggestions because the clients didn’t tag the brand.

That’s why I thought I would give you a couple of tips on discovering consumer insights.

How to discover consumer insights?

There are multiple ways of finding customer insights. Most of the techniques are based on market research and data analysis. You can do it through traditional ways such as surveys or by using a professional tool that monitors online mentions.

Before you start I advise you to:

• Describe what you want to discover. Before conducting research, make sure you know what kind of data you need. 
• Identify your budget and team resources. You’ll need some time and money to obtain consumer insight. 
• Think about how you will use customer insights and behavioral data. I believe you will discover some actionable insights. What you will do with them? Make a post-research plan.

Already know it? Great! You’re ready to choose the best collection method.

01 Surveying, focus group interviews & observations

Many companies use those methods to observe customer behavior, satisfaction, and opinions. They give an opportunity to ask a target group questions, which can become a source of valuable information.

These forms of consumer research enable one to acknowledge people’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions, and opinions in order to understand their needs. 

But surveys and interviews are not suitable or easy for every type of brand though. Especially not for small businesses, or the ones that are just now starting in the industry. They often do not have enough resources or budget to spend on discovering consumer insights.

Also, not all customers are likely to share their thoughts and feedback in confrontation with the brand. That’s why it’s important to use other forms of finding customer insights as well. 

Nowadays the Internet is a place where people mostly speak their minds – they share their thoughts, opinions, feedback, and suggestions. They often do it on social media or other websites.

It is good to keep up with what’s being said by your target group about certain types of products, brands, or industries on different platforms, other than social media as well – on blogs, forums, reviews sites, or podcasts.

Your target audience’s public posts and comments posted online are full of insights, believe me.

Analyzing and drawing conclusions from them can be really effective, as it allows you to get to know your clients a little bit more personally. It allows you to find out about their needs and pain points, that you would never think about. 

02 Using a media monitoring tool

You need to rely on high-quality data. The good news is that you can listen to what your customers say about your brand, products, and services. It’s 100% legal. Monitoring conversations around your brand can give you many valuable customer insights.

Media monitoring works wonders when it comes to discovering and collecting consumer insights. Solutions like Brand24 make the process of finding online opinions, suggestions, and feedback a lot cheaper, easier, and less time-consuming.

How does it work?

The tool browses the Internet for you and finds public posts, comments, conversations that you probably wouldn’t have found manually. With such a tool, you’ll discover every single customer insight. Furthermore, it will help you conduct market research.

The significant advantage of using a media monitoring tool is tracking and analyzing data in real-time. You don’t have to waste time on surveys or interviews. Selected mentions appear in the panel. All you need to do is to read them and draw conclusions.

Here’s what the mentions look like:

As you can see, mentions are marked as positive, negative, or neutral. It’s very beneficial when you want to improve your product or business in general. Negative mentions are signs where you should focus.

Check: Media Monitoring Step by Step: Setting Up a Project

Consumer insights tools

If you want to know what people think about a product, there are a few tools that can help. All in all, analysis is what actually brings them together. The main purpose of those tools is to help you understand your clients better.

As I mentioned, you can discover insights in many different ways. It can be done by social listening and analyzing what people are saying about your company online, checking sentiment analysis, creating surveys and feedback polls, analyzing your social media performance.

There are different tools that offer these kinds of features and make the process of discovering consumer insights easier:

1. Brand24
2. Remesh.ai
3. Facebook Audience Insights
4. Google Trends
5. SurveyMonkey
6. Google Forms
7. Google Analytics

Some of these tools are free, offer a free trial, or are affordable to make discovering client insights accessible.

Consumer insights tools can help you understand what people think about your product. This information is essential to making informed decisions about the future of your business.

With this data, you can figure out how to improve your product and better serve your customers. You’ll be able to create a product that they actually want – not just one that you think they should want.

Conclusions

Many companies face customer retention. They don’t know their clients. That’s a big mistake.

Thanks to conducting consumer and market research, brands can build a strong relationship with clients by serving relevant products, services, and solutions. That’s not everything. Insights can increase sales and improve the general marketing strategy. Furthermore, they are essential while designing a great customer experience and journey.

With proper consumer insights tool, you’ll be able to:

• Conduct the demographic and psychographic analytics of your target audience
• Measure their characteristics, age, gender, education level, ethnic background as well as preferences, habits, factors impacting their general or personality, lifestyle, and favorite social media platforms
• Discover what impact shopping decision

The analysis results will help you build a strategy, create a product based on clients’ needs, learn where to target your campaigns, how to communicate, and which social media can be effective for you.

As you can see, there are lots of benefits. So don’t wait and start your consumer research! Click here and check how Brand24 can discover customer insights for your brand!