Consumer insights are a precious asset for brands and marketers looking to boost their brand development strategies — and there’s many reasons for that.
By using gathered data and insights from past consumers, brands can leverage their knowledge and expertise on their target market to produce valuable content that drives revenue almost on autopilot.
And, there are do’s and don’ts on this matter, which we’ll explain in more detail in this insight article.
What are consumer insights?
Consumer insights (also known as consumer data) are a compilation of direct or indirect information regarding your past clients’ experiences, behavior, likes, and dislikes. It refers to how your consumers engage with your product or service and how your brand can use these insights to improve its quality and even customer attention or support.
Just like TechTarget says, “Consumer – or customer – insights are “the understanding and interpretation of customer data, behaviors, and feedback into conclusions that can be used to improve product development and customer support”.
This definition implies that every interaction with a customer becomes a valuable opportunity to gather relevant information to understand how the market reacts, using this data to enhance their overall experience, boost your brand development strategy, accelerate your growth as a brand, and also… You guessed it — create better campaigns.
Understanding your consumers better than they know themselves and responsibly using this data.
Why should brands use consumer insights in their marketing strategies?
Let’s start off with a main reason why brands should focus on using consumer insights as a primary part of their marketing campaigns, brought to you by Hitachi Solutions:
“Businesses can use these insights to expand their product/service offerings, develop new marketing strategies, create detailed customer personas and journey maps, and enhance current offerings. Because smart use of customer insights is intended to improve customer experience, it can also mean more revenue.”
Brands should leverage these insights to make their products better and improve the way they promote those products and services with highly targeted (and creator-based) marketing campaigns. This includes the deep research phase (creating avatars, or customer personas in this case), the customer journey phase, and the implementation phase (in which brands apply the newly gathered insights to re-start the process).
Brands use consumer insights to focus on improving their service, content, and support… To make their consumers and fanbase happy.
How do brands use their consumer insights and data?
First, they find the insights and data through polls, surveys, engagement, outreach, and social listening.
There are even more ways to gather these consumer insights, but they all revolve around the same fundamental fact: Your consumers want to share these insights with your brand; you just have to listen.
And just after understanding this, brands focus on using their expertise to apply these consumer insights to enhance their brand development.
Why are more and more brands doing this, anyway?
Brands are using consumer insights because they provide an answer for the “why are they doing this?” that makes most marketers scratch their heads non-stop.
That’s also why consumer insights are different than market research, according to Trustpilot:
“Market research can be defined as an effort to gather information about customers or markets. It provides information about market needs, market sizes, competitors, and customers. It is the “what” of customers and markets.
Market research delivers statistics and knowledge. Consumer insights provide the same, but tend to come with recommended actions that will help you amplify the company’s growth. This means the team in charge of consumer insights will deliver both data and narrative, allowing you to use the data.”
This means that market research provides a brand with the knowledge of what’s going on… And a consumer insight tells the brand why it’s happening.
Some benefits of using consumer insights are…
- Consumer insights improve your clients’ customer journey
- Consumer insights highlight how accurate your buyer personas are
- Consumer insights help brands to identify consumer habits
- Consumer insights help brands to measure brand perception
- Consumer insights also bring clarity to customer purchase motivations
Let’s take benefit number 1 as an example:
If your brand wants to simplify and optimize its customer journey, you must reduce friction between stages.
See, a customer journey is composed of different intent stages, from awareness to purchase. And as a brand, your focus should be on reducing the time a customer spends on each stage… Maybe even removing some altogether.
And gathering consumer insights is a deadly effective way to achieve that, as it tells your brand exactly why each persona is on each stage.
Just like Talkwaker says:
“Ultimately, consumer insights will help you solve a number of key problems for your customers, including: Making life easier, making things more interesting, providing value, and solving real-world problems. If you start with these aims in mind, the process by which you gather information on your marketplace becomes a honed and targeted process that generates actual results.”
In essence, paying attention to your consumers’ voice as a brand is crucial… And it’s time to leverage its power to support your brand development strategy.
Brands are using consumer insights… To create winning campaigns
And at Curastory, we love to see that.
For today’s spotlight, we’re bringing you two examples of how a brand can leverage the power of consumer insights to reproduce and optimize its growth strategy.
Starting with an all-time favorite for many of us:
#LikeAGirl, by Always.
Using consumer insights, Always discovered that around 50% of your girls feel paralyzed by the fear of failure, which leads them to avoid trying new things. And they wanted to make them feel understood, valued, and taken care of… Always.
Find Your Greatness, by Nike.
Nike has always (no pun intended) something under its sleeves regarding motivational ads. They just can’t stop doing it.
This Pre-Olympic ad’s message is powerful: It leans toward Nike’s statement that you are an athlete, regardless of whether you’re a pro or not. We’re all athletes, and we can all do what we set our minds to.
How to use your consumer insights for running a creator-based campaign in Curastory
We want to make sure your overall brand experience is memorable here at Curastory, so we’ll share a quick step-by-step to run a successful creator-based campaign using our platform.
First step: Making sure you have the right strategy in place
Now, it’s important to note that these consumer insights are key indicators of how your content is seen across the board… And having the right plan will help you pivot when necessary.
Let’s say you decide to run a creator-based campaign with a fitness content creator focused on Instagram.
Typically, you’d need to perform an entire audit to determine if this creator is the right fit for you… Resulting in more time, effort, and budget consumed.
However, Curastory does that for you — we pick the perfect fit depending on your targeted audience so you can make an informed decision seamlessly.
Second step: Uploading your campaign details
Once you get paired up with a few hundred creators, your directions, product links, and script information with the specific details of your campaign will be automatically shared with them.
Pretty straightforward and simple, as things should be.
Third step: Tracking your campaign’s performance
Data is only valid when you pay attention to it — and performance from your consumer insights are valuable data.
We track the return on ad spend from the creator advertisements directly from your social channels, such as Facebook, Google Analytics, and Shopify collecting over 100 data inputs to determine your ROAS.
Allowing you, a purposeful brand, to use these metrics to improve your content, products, or even create more tailored strategies.
And we’re here to help you achieve this
We’re always here.
At Curastory, we enjoy supporting meaningful brands to take their ROAS to new all-time heights through creator video content… For which consumer insights could be convenient.
Got questions? Feel free to reach out — we’ll do our best to help.
Until next time!
– The Curastory Team
