Don’t Start with Your Marketing Message. Start with Customer Insights
Introduction
Let’s take a scenario from just a few decades ago. The various channels at a marketer’s disposal were television channels, newspapers, and radio stations across the country. This made the mass market easily accessible with the guarantee that the target audience will inevitably come across their message. Moreover, marketers felt it was enough to craft a marketing message to attract customers. As long as they had a product, customers would obviously come to buy it. Compare it to the scene today. The numbers of channels have dramatically increased with customers showing dynamic behavior unique to each channel. There is also a deluge of information available at hand that’s allowing customers to be more aware and make informed decisions. This has created a shift between marketers’ perception of what customers want and what customers actually want. This, in turn, has led to a solution to take advantage of this present situation — ‘customer insight’.
Customer Insights or CI can be defined as a set of data utilized by businesses to define or understand their target audience. An apt definition has been provided by Paul Laughlin — “A non-obvious understanding about your customers, which if acted upon, has the potential to change their behavior for mutual benefit”.
All Answers Lie With The Customer
Marketers mostly become busy with buzzwords such as KPIs, omnichannel, metrics, etc. but often forget the most important factor — customers. The biggest mistake we make is by not paying heed to what our customers need, ask and say. If you don’t believe it, look at this statistic — 79% of customers want to purchase from brands only after they see that the brands care about them first.
If as a marketer, your strategy is to rush to communicate your marketing message to your customers in the first instance, think again. Ask these questions -
● Is my product/service about what I think my customer wants or what the customer actually wants?
● What are their specific pain points?
● What are they talking about?
● What language do they understand — technical or simple?
Answering these questions will help you to understand and connect with your customers on a deeper and a more personal level.
You can start by identifying your audience properly. This will help you to avoid crafting a generic message and communicating ambiguously to them. As per Infosys, 74% of customers feel annoyed when they encounter generic content on websites. You surely don’t want to be one of those organizations. Next, you must try to identify their pain points. It’s not enough to assume that your product/service is going to benefit your customers, it’s important to find out what their problems are and analyze if your product/service can actually solve them. Moreover, don’t try to isolate your customers by using technical jargon that they probably won’t understand. There are various sources from where you can gather customer insights such as forums, social media, Google Trends, etc.
In New Marketing, Customer Insight Is The Way To Go
Customer insights can redefine marketing in the present century. This is because it helps organizations delve deeper into the customer’s mind and make changes in their strategy accordingly. It provides organizations with the data that determines what ticks a customer — based on their moods, aspirations, needs that finally transform into action.
One of the things marketers are concerned about is ROI. Fortunately, there is a link between customer insight and ROI. Here’s how. When you just assume what the customer wants and come up with strategies based on that, it may seem like throwing a stone in the dark. What customer insight does is remove the guesswork out of the entire process. Instead of assumptions, it gets the data directly from the customer. When customers themselves direct you towards what, when and how they want something, it helps you save a lot of time, money and effort. With a better understanding of your customer, you’ll be able to take better marketing decisions, thereby increasing profitability and better ROI.
Let’s understand this with the help of a case study. Take the example of 3, a Hong Kong-based brand providing mobile and internet services across specific countries. Their famed “Holiday Spam” campaign showed how customer insights can make or break a campaign. By analyzing their customers holiday behavior, they found that customer utilized 71 times more data than they would have at the existing mobile rates while abroad. The more interesting fact was that this data was used for sharing selfies and photographs on social media. Figuring out that their audience loved to show off while on holiday, they introduced a campaign which slashed the roaming charges and allowed their customers to use their mobile data at normal charges. They also shared a slideshow presentation with attractive holiday pictures and an apology message. Not only did this campaign use the reverse psychology right but also nailed the campaign at the right time with the help of customer insights.
What Do Customer Insights Include
Customer insights merely don’t help you identify your customer correctly. It also helps you answer questions such as why your customers aren’t buying, what they feel or think before buying, and how to convince them into buying again.
There are 3 elements that customer insights comprise of:
1. Segmentation — Instead of targeting a broad group, narrowing down your target audience can help you reach more relevant customers who’ll be interested in your business. You should focus on the unique needs and wants of each specific group of an audience through segmentation. When you’ll have your products/services built around specific customer needs, they’ll have more chances of boosting customer retention.
2. Analytics — Customer analytics helps in tracking and analyzing customer behavior and preference shifts. With this knowledge, you can change your marketing strategy to adapt to those needs. This can include tapping into the right channels for improved communication, keeping an eye at churn rate and devising tactics to boost retention.
3. Engagement — You can collect relevant and actionable engagement insights from customer feedback, customer journey mapping, measurement of customer satisfaction, etc. This will help you understand your customer’s needs, expectations, and buying behavior. Based on their engagement, you can plan your strategies accordingly to keep on giving them what they want.
These 3 elements together can arm you with the right information to reach the right results. They’ll lead to better customer satisfaction, reduced marketing costs, and better customer retention.
How You Can Use Customer Insights For Personalized Marketing
A study by McKinsey Global Institute shows that organizations driven by data had 23 times more potential to acquire customers, 6 times more potential to retain them, and 19 times more potential to be profitable.
That’s how important customer insight is. If you want to incorporate customer insights into your business as well, you can try out SmartKarrot. One of the world’s first Engagement Optimization Platform, it provides a comprehensive set of features that cover all elements of customer insights. With a simple SDK/API integration, you can have all the insights you need at your fingertips without having to write a single line of code.
● SmartSegmentation — With an intuitive ability to segment your audience, this feature will improve your campaign performance as a whole. With a simple visual interface and several parameters for segmentation, it’s easy to use and customize. It also gives you the option to combine multiple segmentation parameters and create static or dynamic audience groups.
● SmartAnalytics — This feature is simple and easy to use and curbs the time you require to gather analytics. It focuses on providing several data points to engage your users which helps you evaluate what works and what doesn’t work, thereby helping you take better decisions.
● SmartEngagementScore — The omnichannel engagement feature helps you to keep track of customer engagement and provides you with actionable insights on how to improve it. With better knowledge on engagement performance, you can focus better on retention and loyalty.
