Any successful marketing campaign is more than just the techniques you use. Yes, your social media content can go viral, and your search engine-optimized (SEO) content can drive traffic. Nevertheless, it’s vital to not treat customers as a passive recipient of materials.
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There’s increasing recognition that a certain amount of personalization is vital in marketing. Brands have noted how Amazon and Netflix leverage user data to make relevant recommendations in their marketing. This tends to keep consumers more engaged. The positive impact of personalization isn’t limited to one-to-one connections with consumers, though. The strategies your brand uses can also be designed to impact your specific target market. This is where consumer insights tools are becoming invaluable. The better and more efficiently your business can retrieve and interpret consumer data, the more relevant your campaigns can become.
Let’s take a closer look at this idea, alongside some of the best consumer insights tools available at the moment.
What Information Should You Look For?
Picking the best consumer insights tools depends on the types of information you’re after. It’s best to start with looking at what we mean by insights in marketing. The mistake too many people make is assuming that insights are simply the results of market research. In reality, it’s an umbrella that comprises various different types of data that help us to interpret consumer behavior, preferences, and needs. This helps you make more informed decisions about how your marketing can influence customers.
Some of the data to look for that give these actionable insights include:
- Consumer sentiment;
- Direct feedback;
- Behavioral data;
- Purchase histories;
- Market trends.
While there are other useful data sets, these are among the core elements for gaining useful insights. The tools you choose should capture these metrics. In some cases, you’ll be able to get multiple insight types on a single platform. Nevertheless, platforms specializing in a single type of insight can be effective, too.
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The 4 Best Consumer Insights Tools
The best consumer insights tools are those that help you to strategically gather and interpret data relatively simply. We’ve highlighted some of the platforms that can be powerful influences on your marketing for different types of customer information.
Sentiment analysis with Determ
Having a good understanding of what your customers think about your brand is important, because it enables you to make adjustments to lean into the positive customer sentiments and mitigate the negative. A sentiment analysis tool — like Determ — can unlock these insights.
In essence, this tool makes it easier to find data on consumer sentiments and interpret this in an actionable way. It pulls consumer feedback from across social media platforms and the wider internet, including reviews. It also produces clear reports that highlight a variety of elements. These include the division of positive and negative sentiments and even the language customers use when describing your brand. This gives you a better understanding of people’s associations with your brand.
How is this useful? Well, let’s say you’re marketing an eco-friendly fashion brand. Sentiment analysis can help you to understand how much confidence the public has in the brand’s sustainability measures. A good example of this is a recent study by DataEQ, the UK Fashion ESG Index, which used sentiment analysis to establish Burberry as having the most positive public perception related to environmental factors.
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Web analytics with Google Analytics
With so much of marketing being digital, it stands to reason that learning about how consumers behave online can help your campaigns. With accurate insights, you get to adjust your materials to mesh better with the ways consumers prefer to navigate online spaces. This is where web analytics software — like Google Analytics — comes into play.
These consumer insights tools collate and interpret data on how consumers interact with online materials connected to your brand. This includes how much time visitors spend on specific pages of your website and what they tend to click away from. You can also see where traffic to your web materials is coming from so you can focus your efforts on similar areas.
In addition, like many emerging technologies, web analytics platforms utilize machine learning for faster and more agile data processing. This is a subset of artificial intelligence (AI) that uses algorithms to learn from large data sets much more quickly than humans do. When tools like Google Analytics use machine learning, you gain insights you may not have been able to access easily through manual means. More importantly, machine learning can use consumer behavior data to provide predictions. The software can give you insights into how users are likely to interact with your web materials in the future.
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A good example of this is how McDonalds has used Google Analytics. The brand needed to increase home delivery conversions via its online app. It used insights from analytics data to better understand how consumers interacted with the app and other marketing materials. This, combined with machine learning, enabled them to predict which demographics would be most likely to order in the next seven days. As a result, they could not only focus marketing on the most receptive audiences but also see opportunities for improvements.
Customer data platforms with Segment
Customer data platforms are an example of the multi-faceted consumer insights tools we mentioned earlier. This software gathers data from multiple sources. This information can give you a more holistic picture of your consumers, their behaviors, and their preferences. For instance, Segment can pull information from both native and external channels. This means it can use data from your own website, customer purchase histories, and brand interactions on social media and even email open rates.
Read 5 Examples of Good Customer Service
It might seem a little unwieldy, having all this information in a single place. However, platforms like Segment also give you the option of allocating “north star” metrics. This is effectively a way of highlighting what is most important to your brand or campaign at any given time. As a result, you’ll access reports that relate to this.
How does this work on a practical level? One example is during the process of making a creative brief for marketing campaigns. A brief is essential for ensuring project contributors use marketing methods that are aligned with consumer preferences and needs. This includes highlighting information about who the target audience is and how the brand wants to connect with them. Integrating insights from customer data platforms in this document helps to illustrate the target more fully. Contributors can then make strategic choices that are most likely to be relevant to the audience and campaign.
Read 5 Best Tools for Market Research
Customer Surveys with SurveyMonkey
Sometimes, great insights don’t necessarily come from analysis of customer behavior. It’s also important to also get data directly from customers. When customers are willing to share with you, you’re likely to get honest insights into their experiences with your brand. There’s a certain amount you can achieve by reviewing customer service responses. However, you can get more targeted insights by issuing surveys through platforms like SurveyMonkey.
One of the benefits of these types of consumer insight tools is they provide solutions to the challenges of surveys. Chief among these is getting customers to engage with them. While you can use survey templates, these platforms allow you to customize with brand elements. This helps consumers see that the survey is directly associated with your brand, rather than a disposable generic item. There are also options to customize questions to each respondent, boosting relevance. Importantly, SurveyMonkey utilizes AI algorithms to design questions most likely to deliver clear insights.
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For example, you might be trying to determine what types of marketing tools resonate with your audience. You can develop a survey around consumers’ past interactions with your brand and advertising in general. This can include a combination of qualitative scoring and quantitative questions. These platforms not only let you quickly produce and issue these surveys, but you can also use the software’s interface to see interpretations of results. This helps you to shape your campaigns in more impactful ways.
Conclusion
By selecting the right consumer insights tools, your brand can access data that influences how effective your campaigns are. It’s important to look at what your marketing needs are and how these platforms could address them. For instance, if you’re unsure how customers feel about your brand, Determ’s sentiment analysis tool can unlock actionable data. Remember, too, that technology is changing at a rapid pace. Keeping abreast of new tools on the market can help you connect more effectively with consumers.
