Broadly speaking, there are two ways to enhance revenue: save more or sell more. What if you could do both, simultaneously?
That’s what consumer insights research delivers — hyper-targeted marketing that saves money and outstanding customer experiences that boost sales.
How? Let’s take a look.
What are consumer insights?
Consumer insights or consumer market insights are conclusions or inferences made from the analysis of consumer data collected from a variety of sources.
These insights are used to improve products, marketing strategies, customer support, and all business decisions that impact your customers.
Consumer insights and analytics come under the expansive umbrella of market research, which is identical to consumer research, except that instead of exclusively collecting data about your consumers, you collect data about every facet of the market that may impact your business, such as your competitors.
So, market research is an extremely broad practice, where one of its objectives is seeking consumer insights. Though some would argue that it is the one that is most critical.
Why are consumer insights so important?
Today, consumer insights consulting is in incredible demand.
And why not? It has been consistently demonstrated that businesses that invest in consumer insights and analytics are rewarded with increased revenue, directly or indirectly.
Here’s how.
Personalized customer experiences
Take a look at these facts.
According to a study by PwC, 42% of consumers would prefer to pay more for a better experience.
According to Forbes, 73% of businesses that offer a better than average customer experience perform much better financially, compared to businesses that don’t.
Or consider this Microsoft report, according to which a moderate increase in customer experience “generates an average revenue increase of $775 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues.”
All three studies, and a dozen of others, point to the fact that consumers love to be heard. And only those businesses that engage in consumer insights research can hear them.
What do they have to say? Three words: personalized customer experiences.
Compared to standard experiences, personalized experiences are cherished more by your consumers because they, by nature, are tailor-made for them. They are powered by a consumer-first approach that leverages consumer data, reflecting their likes and dislikes, to shape experiences that compel them to engage again and again.
Personalized customer experiences also make for stunning customer support: consumer insights are conclusions that not just predict consumer preferences but also pain points. These points can be addressed by support teams, thereby solving problems before they are perceived as problems.
This is the stuff of brand loyalty.
Precision or hyper-targeted marketing
As the facts illustrated, personalized customer experiences boost sales.
However, there’s another way to make money — by saving it. This is also where consumer insights can be of immense help.
Consumer insights can potentially save millions of dollars by encouraging precision marketing.
Guessing what would work is equivalent to simply throwing stuff at the wall, hoping that something would stick. You might as well give away your money.
Indeed, intelligent businesses understand that marketing campaigns demand more than money: they demand time, creativity, energy, and other finite resources that could have been spent on something better. Verifiably better.
Verifiable is the key word here. Instead of guessing, businesses ought to adopt a data-driven marketing strategy — determining what is most likely to work and creating a campaign that aims to achieve it.
You might ask, how do we determine what is most likely to work? Consumer insights, of course!
The most successful businesses leverage consumer insights to create the most productive, most effective marketing strategy. They combine consumer data with first-rate data analytics to determine extremely well-defined targets, leaving nothing to be ambiguous.
Knowing precisely who and where to target, they then use data analytics to determine what could achieve that target most efficiently.
In other words, most successful businesses are data-driven through and through.
The logic is shockingly simple: the higher the odds that your campaign will succeed, the lower the odds that you will lose money. And if everything goes well, a lot of money.
Explore new opportunities
Broadly speaking, customer insights are trends — correlations between two behaviours.
For example, consumers who buy reading desks for children also tend to buy children’s books. There are hundreds and thousands of trends like these, some discovered, some undiscovered.
This knowledge can be used by businesses to up-sell and cross-sell their products or services. In fact, what’s outstanding about consumer insights research is that not only can it tell us who is buying what but also how much.
This data might seem trivial but to your sales team, it is invaluable.
Data analytics — thorough enough — can account for every single decision you make, even at the tiniest scales such as the cost-effectiveness of stocking an additional unit.
By learning from consumer insights what sells and by how much, businesses can further reduce losses, stocking the number of units that are most likely to sell.
In other words, businesses can generate a verifiable marketing projection for markets they have never even explored before!
As they gradually enter a new market, they can further collect and analyse consumer data to gain insights that can be used to strengthen their place in it. To conquer it, perhaps.
Develop a dynamic strategy
That said, change is the only thing constant.
Consumer preferences change, technologies evolve, culture evolves. But of what use is market research if it does not prepare you for change?
Changes in preferences are reflected in consumer data, and hence consumer insights. These new insights, then, can be used to develop a new strategy.
Although this demands businesses to always stay on their toes, always aloof to changes, constantly monitoring consumer and market data.
Though that is the cost of success, of gaining market intelligence: dynamic business strategies — strategies that rapidly evolve and adapt to change — are the best strategies.
Such a strategy is optimised for success as it constantly changes to minimize the gap between what it is and what it ought to be.
The drive for exploration or evolution is fueled by data — the fruits of consumer insights and analytics.
How to get started
Yes, consumer insights deliver growth. They help businesses gain an edge, to stand out among the competition.
Naturally, everyone wants in.
However, while data might seem abundant, insights are not. In 2021, it might seem that data is everywhere you look. Though the creativity to extract meaning from it is rare.
In fact, creativity is secondary. No amount of computing power or creativity can produce truly meaningful insights if the collected data is of poor quality in the first place.
Companies such as SG Analytics and other world-class consumer insights firms always ensure that the consumer data they collect is of the highest quality, drawn from a wide variety of sources.
As for creativity, we work with a diverse team of developers, analysts, and marketers, which enables us to connect dots where others see none.
SG Analytics has also adopted the best data management and security policies, making sure that data is easily accessible and always safe.
Redefine your relationship with your consumers. Get started today.
