What are customer insights? How to build them in 6 steps

These days, a product alone is no longer how people recognize target customers a brand. Instead, putting the customer at the center decides whether a business succeeds or fails. It means keeping up with consumer tastes so you can adjust your products and services to fit. This is called Customer Insight hay customer insight.

Anyone working in Marketing or who often browses marketer forums and communities has probably heard of this concept before. But what exactly is a customer insight and how do you identify the right customer insights? Let's Mona Media take a closer look at this interesting topic in the article below.

The concept of customer insight

By definition, a customer insight, or customer insights, is the analysis of data collected from customers to find trends in their behavior toward products on the market. From there, a business can make marketing strategy, production changes to improve product and service quality, benefiting both the business and its customers.

A customer insight is “the thoughts and desires hidden deep inside that shape a customer's behavior and buying decisions”. It is a very hard field, and businesses must invest a lot of resources and effort to research it properly.

A customer insight is an unspoken truth, the motive behind different customer behaviors. These are “truths” that have to be inferred and interpreted from observing and tracking customer behavior. The value customer insights bring matches, and even exceeds, the effort put in. Once a business knows what its customers “really” want, it can change its business strategy and deliver a more positive buying experience.

And when customers feel more comfortable, they spend more and stay with the brand longer (Brand Loyalty).

Why do customer insights matter so much?

You now know what a customer insight is. So why does it matter so much? The reasons below make its importance clearer.

• Customer insights help us understand our target customers better, and so shape business and marketing strategies that fit.
• With customer insights, we can find solutions that meet customer needs effectively, which lifts sales and loyal customers.
• Collecting customer insights also helps us make better decisions when developing new products and services, and helps us improve and optimize the customer experience.
• Without customer insights, a business will also struggle to meet every client and will not be able to compete in the market.
• Understanding customer insights helps you make more accurate choices and secure the success and sustainability of your business.

Characteristics of customer insight

The term customer insights refers to understanding customers. But not every inference about consumer behavior is a customer insight, so research into customer insights needs to pay attention to what makes an insight.

Customer insights are not obvious facts

As defined, a customer insight is an unspoken understanding, so information that is too obvious and easy to collect through statistics or tracking is not a customer insight. Demographic information such as age, gender, personal income or location, and so on, is only raw material. Marketers must research and analyze it to draw out a customer insight.

You cannot analyze customer insights from just one kind of data

Customer Insights Highly accurate insights are usually distilled from many different types of data about customers. For example, you need to combine two metrics, bounce rate and time on page to judge whether your site's content is good quality and meets visitors' search needs. From there you can find the right fix.

Customer insights must lead to a solution

The purpose of researching customer insights is to find solutions to a business's problems. The biggest problem, of course, is how to maintain sales and grow the business.

But at each stage there are smaller, more urgent problems to solve first:

• When you need a new strategy to keep customers long term and build a loyal user community.
• When you need to promote a new product to long-standing users.
• When expanding the market into a new field or targeting a new type of customer, and so on.

The solution must be able to change consumer behavior

Consumer behavior and Customer Insight influence each other in both directions.

• Customer insight goes beyond understanding customers; it can change them. Example: A classic case study is Apple, which encouraged users to express their personality through the colors of their devices.

• Customer insights create a more positive buying experience, which encourages people to follow along more. And it is not only the business that benefits, but the customers too.

• They change their behavior in a positive direction to get a more enjoyable experience when shopping and using products. This also shows customer insight is not a “trick” used only to increase sales or to mislead consumers.

Advantages of customer insight

The biggest and most direct benefit of What are customer insights? is that it makes a business's marketing work better.

Refine the customer journey map

To last, a business needs more than buyers; it needs customers who come back to buy again. We even need them to become a “relay point” that spreads the word to potential customers others. That is why we build, and keep refining, the customer journey map.

For a business, the the customer journey map is the path they “want” customers to take, which means it can be adjusted and improved. A business has to do everything to improve the buying experience at every milestone. Only then can it make and turn more visitors, customers happy with the shopping experience and come back next time.

And customer insights are the tool that helps a business do this.

Strengthen your competitive edge in the market

Effective customer insight research helps a business predict where things are heading, so it can get ahead of trends and gain more advantages than its competitors.

See also: How to get ahead of trends for the most effective marketing

Grow your market share

As we know, customer insights help a business understand its target customers and meet their needs as well as possible. As a result, sales and doanh thu, profit and market share both grow significantly.

Adapt to every change

In business, change over time is unavoidable. Customer insight research helps a business find out what customers want now and in the future, and propose matching changes, such as marketing strategy, brand positioning that fit, or promotions to keep customers loyal.

In addition, customer insights play an important part in carrying out a personalized marketing strategy. Consumer insight results are not necessarily used for personalized marketing, but the data collected during analysis can be used to greatly improve a business's personalized marketing.

See also: Steps to build a successful personal brand

Disadvantages of customer insight

Despite its many strong advantages, Customer Insights customer insight also has some drawbacks. The sections below point out the weaknesses of customer insights:

Inaccurate analysis results

As noted, customer insights are conclusions “drawn” from user behavior across hundreds of data points, but in the end they are still “inferences”. So a customer insight can still be wrong. This can come from several issues:

• The ability of the marketing team doing the customer insight research.
• Mistakes in approach or data collection, or tool errors.
• Differences in how the research team sees and reasons about things.

And when customer insights are wrong, whatever you apply them to will not deliver the expected results.

Still, every calculation has errors and every method has risks. When a customer insight is accurate, the benefit far outweighs the loss. You can raise the accuracy of customer insights by investing more in your marketing team or by using outsourced marketing services .

The outsourced marketing department market is fiercely competitive today. Demand for these services keeps rising, but picking a reliable provider is not easy. That is why Mona Media offers an outsourced marketing department that brings big breakthroughs in marketing communications. The Mona Media marketing team is highly skilled and knows Google, SEO tips, website optimization and more.

With a professional team of specialists equipped with a full set of tools, Mona carries out full-scope SEO to bring in more than 10,000 visits per month and grow revenue 5x.

Mona will draw up a marketing plan made for you based on your business model. We commit to delivering online marketing services up to standard, helping you compete with rivals and rank higher in search results. So use an outsourced marketing department today to seize the chance to move up and lead your industry.

For more details about the service, contact Mona Media directly on the hotline 1900 636 648.

Users can change their preferences at any time

Every calculation and strategy built on unspoken truths can come to nothing because users suddenly change their tastes.

There are many factors that influence a consumer's buying decision . This forces businesses to stop old campaigns and rebuild their data and approach strategy. That is costly, and it also lowers the credibility and effectiveness of the customer insight method.

Customer insight only applies to one specific audience

Overall, the pros and cons of customer insights both come down to accuracy within one specific audience.

Because you have to do market research, and analyze the behavior of a particular group in depth, before you can identify their customer insights. For the same reason, the results cannot be applied to other types of customers outside the group studied.

Why customer insight matters in marketing

Studying and analyzing how consumers judge your products and services helps you understand customer needs better. So how important are customer insights in marketing?

Customer insights strengthen your edge over competitors

One key to standing out in the market is knowing your customers. But collecting and analyzing that information can be complicated and time-consuming. That is why customer insights emerged as a useful tool for businesses to strengthen their competitive edge.

Faster revenue and market share growth

One way to strengthen a business's competitive edge is to focus on growing revenue and market share. To get there, a business needs to understand its the market, its competitors and its customer insights, and adjust its strategy to match market needs. A business also needs to offer better and more attractive products and services than rivals, suited more closely to customers, in order to win market share.

Change strategy to adapt to each situation

Depending on the situation, a business may need to change strategy to adapt. For example, if the market is shifting, the business may need to change its products and services to meet customer needs. If a competitor dominates the market, the business may need to find ways to depend less on those products or services and look for new opportunities to expand market share.

Customer insights vs. market research

The concept of Customer Insights and Market Research both involve gathering information about customers to help businesses understand market needs. There are, however, some differences between the two.

So if you want to understand your customers more deeply and find creative solutions for your products or services, customer insights are a good choice. On the other hand, if you need hard numbers and specific information about the market and customers, market research is the best way to collect it.

How to build customer insights

Building accurate customer insights takes a proper process. Follow the 6 basic steps below.

Step 1: Sketch your potential customer profile

In this step, we focus on defining the characteristics of potential customers. You need to study the age, gender, occupation, interests and needs of the customers your business is aiming at.

See more: 5 steps to define your customer persona

Step 2: Research target customer needs

Once you have sketched the potential customer profile, look further into the needs of target customers. That means asking questions like “What are our customers looking for?” and “What problems are making things hard for our customers?” Answering these 2 questions helps you understand customer insight research for your business better.

Step 3: Research the market and competitors

To understand customers better, we also need to look at the market and where our competitors stand. This gives us an overview of the industry and what attracts customers. From there we can set reasonable goals for building the business strategy.

See more: 7 steps to analyze competitors in business

Step 4: Run a real-world survey

With an overview of customers and the market, we need to run real surveys to understand these points better. A survey can involve meeting customers in person or running online surveys. Depending on the business, you can choose how to run it.

Step 5: Collect and analyze data

After the real-world survey, we need to collect and analyze the data to understand actual customer needs and current market trends. The data can include customer statistics, data from market reports and customer feedback.

Step 6: Measure and evaluate

Finally, measure and evaluate the results you gathered while identifying customer insights. This helps us see how successful marketing campaign was, and make the strategy changes your business needs to match the customer insights.

5 factors for identifying the right customer insights

Factor 1: Build a professional customer insight analysis team

A customer insights team needs to be strong, with expertise and experience in marketing and customer insight analysis. It also needs energy, enthusiasm and dedication to the work.

Customer insight is a complex field, with many kinds of data to collect for analysis, and researchers have to spend a lot of time and effort. This data is also scattered across many platforms and customer communication channels.

• To pull all this data together, customer insights staff have to work hard and not shy away from “mountains” of data.
• They also need a very logical mind to see how different numbers and data relate to each other.
• Finding an “insight” also takes intuition, and the ability to understand consumer psychology and behavior.

For all these reasons, building an effective and strong customer insights team should be a top priority for a business. But if your business does not have enough resources to do the research, then hire a full-service marketing service from a professional company to get the best marketing results.

Factor 2: Decide what types of data to collect

There is a huge amount of data about a business, its customers and its operations.

• Some types appear often and carry a lot of weight, such as sales, revenue, customers' personal information or their satisfaction with the product. But some kinds of data are not easy to spot yet still have very specific meaning.

• For online stores and websites in general, click-through rate and bounce rate are 2 critical metrics. They show a lot, especially the relationship between how popular a website is and how useful it is. How long visitors stay on the page is another important metric for judging the quality of site content.
• You also need to decide which platform to focus on for customer insight research. It could be direct interviews with customers, email surveys, or studying conversations on social media.

There are countless related kinds of data, but not all are useful. Collecting everything adds to the workload and complicates the analysis. So customer insight researchers must decide in advance which types of data are needed to solve the problems at hand.

Factor 3: Decide which tools to use

Once you have decided what data to collect and where, you need to choose a tool for measuring customer insights that is useful and powerful.

There are many tools for measuring customer insights, and each suits certain platforms.

• On websites, tracking tools continuously collect data used to identify customer insights, such as visit and bounce rates, conversion rate, time on page, and the busiest hours of the day.
• The Social Media Marketing (social media marketing), some tools measure customer insights through user conversations, likes, shares and interactions with a brand, the number of hashtag or other references to the brand name in posts or comments, and so on.

Data on every platform can be collected and measured. What matters is using the right tool: one with the right functions, strong, up to date and supported 24/7. It should export statistical charts that present the data objectively and in detail, and help you pin down the customer insights you need more precisely.

See also: Full-service social media marketing for businesses

Factor 4: Collect data

The next step in identifying customer insight is to collect data. Data collection methods also vary by platform and by data source, as mentioned above. There are 2 data sources for gathering data: traditional sources and modern sources.

Traditional data sources

• Traditional data sources marketers can collect from are focus groups and survey questions.
• A focus group is a direct interview with a small group of people who share demographic traits (age, education, job, income and so on).
• Survey data from a focus group is highly accurate for people in that group or with similar traits.
• A business can build a sensible approach strategy from focus group information and apply it to similar audiences or nearby areas.
• Another very common traditional data source is surveying customers or potential customers directly.
• A business can look into customer insights by interviewing individual customers directly through Email marketing, questionnaires or customer care hotline calls.

The advantage of this source is high reliability, because users state their thoughts and feelings themselves. However, it needs customer participation, which can sometimes be a nuisance for customers.

Because of this limit, marketers need “tricks” such as coupon, vouchers, giveaways, loyalty points and gifts to encourage users to join a survey. At the same time, data must be collected from other sources too.

Modern data sources

Modern sources for measuring Customer Insights are social media platforms, websites, forums and online communities.

Pros:

• The biggest advantage of modern data sources, which is also the weakness of traditional ones, is convenience.
• They do not require users to take part directly in measuring customer insights, so there is no bother or wasted time for them.
• Data is now collected quietly by tracking engines.

Example:

• On websites, blogs or forums, tools track and measure metrics such as search trends on search engines like Google and Bing, number of website visits, bounce rate, time spent per day/week/month, and so on.
• On social media such as Facebook, Zalo and Instagram, the data to collect includes the number of times a product name is mentioned (tagged), likes, shares and interactions, and so on. These engines can even use algorithms to analyze user attitudes from the content of posts (content marketing) and comments without asking a single question.

Sometimes data from modern sources is even more accurate than from traditional ones. People are emotional, and sometimes they do not know why they bought a product. If they do not know, the reasons they give in a survey will not really be sound or tied to their own buying behavior.

Limitation: The only drawback of modern sources is that customers may feel watched and that their privacy is being invaded. But not many users notice this, and not many businesses analyze customer insights by illegal methods. So it is not a fatal flaw of modern data sources.

See also:

• How to do effective marketing on Zalo
• 28+ ways to increase engagement on Facebook

Factor 5: Analyze data to find customer insights and take action

Drawing on phân tích thị trường and the data already collected, the customer insights team has to discuss and analyze together to identify the right customer insights. This can take a lot of time and brainpower, and the people involved need both expertise and experience to find the most reasonable and effective solution.

As things develop, personalizing everything will be a very popular trend, giving consumers a better experience. So the question of what customer insights are, already important, is now more necessary than ever. Businesses should invest in building a strong, committed customer insights team so they can understand customers and serve them better, turning them into completely loyal users.

See more: In-depth online marketing training courses for businesses

Tools for researching customer insights in marketing

Using tools for researching customer data in marketing are very important. They help businesses grasp the market and improve their business strategy. Here are some tools you can use to collect customer data more effectively:

• Google Analytics: A free tool that analyzes traffic and interactions on your website. You can track which pages customers visit often, time on site, and the most-viewed products.
• Google Trends: A search trend research tool that helps you spot customers' latest search trends. You can search for keywords related to your products and see how their search trends move over a period of time.
• YouTube Analytics: A free tool that analyzes traffic and interactions on your YouTube channel. You can track views, subscribers and customers' average watch time on your channel. SEO Youtube is also a way to reach potential customers.
• Social Mention: A free tool that tracks mentions of your brand on social networks and other websites. You can see customers' reviews, comments and impressions of your products.
• Information on Facebook: On Facebook, you can look for groups, pages and users related to your products. You can read customers' comments, reviews and remarks about your products.

See more: The 10 best online marketing tools today

Limitations of customer insights to keep in mind

Collecting customer insights has benefits such as meeting customer preferences, predicting needs and keeping communication assured. But it also faces many challenges, such as privacy, limits on data use, maintenance and security. If these issues are not handled, using customer data can lead to bad consequences such as:

• Security breaches
• Unwanted use of data
• Unwanted contact from third parties

So bad factors need to be minimized, and the competitive benefits supported by research should be optimized for marketers.

Frequently asked questions (FAQ)

How important are customer insights?

A person's insight drives their buying behavior. That is why researching customer insights becomes a top task when a business plans a product launch and development strategy.

What role does insight play in SEO?

As noted, building customer insights is very important in marketing, including SEO Google. Once you identify insights in SEO, a business can steer its content SEO strategy and write content that brings higher returns.

Mona Media offers professional content marketing services. Contact us on the hotline 1900 636 648 if you have any questions about the service.

How many types of data are needed to analyze customer insights?

You need to combine a variety of data types to analyze insights.

What is a customer persona?

A customer persona is a detailed marketing profile of one or more specific people, covering basic demographics, behavior, interests and the factors that influence their buying decisions.

Why understand customer insights?

Understanding customer insights helps a business quickly adjust or change product offers, pricing strategy, marketing strategy, messaging and more, in time to compete with rivals.

Examples of customer insights

Below are specific examples of famous brands that built customer insights successfully to grow and keep a competitive edge in the market, for you to reference.

BAEMIN: hot and crispy, coming right up

BAEMIN does not focus only on menu choice, delivery speed or its promotions, but also tries to connect with customers emotionally, creating a good experience for body and mind.

Its catchy slogans are set in an intimate context and aim at what matters to customers: “Come on, give me your hand, let's order together”, or “No reason needed to order, just a discount code”.

BAEMIN's target customers are office workers aged 20 to 30. It focuses on different emotions to meet varied eating needs. The campaign is designed to make customers aware of and think about the emotions in choosing food, which pushes them to follow through with their orders.

Samsung – Look at me campaign

Samsung's target audience was parents of young children with autism. This is not an easy group to reach and win over. So Samsung looked for a suitable strategy to attract the attention of parents and their beloved children.

The research and data Samsung collected showed that children with autism love interacting with digital devices. So Samsung planned to develop the world's first camera-based interactive app to help children practice social and communication skills.

To make the app effective, Samsung worked with doctors and development experts to design 7 tasks and 7 exercises that help children with autism improve eye contact. Clinical trial results showed that 60% of the children made better eye contact and the other 40% improved at conveying emotions. This is a significant success and shows technology can play an important role in helping children with autism build social skills more fully.

DOVE – For Real Beauty

Dove's “For Real Beauty” campaign spread successfully and built positive brand awareness with customers in 2004. It also helped change prejudices about beauty standards.

Dove found that very few women, about 2%, describe themselves as beautiful. From that it created the “For Real Beauty” campaign to help women feel confident and comfortable in their skin, and to carry a new message: Beauty does not only come from the outside; it is also a source of confidence and joy in life.

To spread the campaign's message, Dove made a series of videos and TV shorts, including the best known, “Real Beauty Sketches”. The video got a positive response from the public, especially women. The campaign also helped Dove build brand love and raise awareness of its brand, especially among women.

The “For Real Beauty” campaign changed how many people see beauty and encouraged women to trust and love themselves more. It also contributed to a society that is diverse and accepts people with different kinds of beauty, without prejudice or discrimination.

Read now: A 10-step process for building a successful personal brand

OMO – Dirt is good

Mothers in Asian markets often believe that keeping children clean is the most important thing. But some argue that letting children get dirty can bring many benefits.

One of the breakthrough ideas was to change how mothers see getting dirty. Instead of seeing a boring, annoying problem, they can see that getting dirty is a way for children to learn and experience the world around them more creatively and enjoyably.

So OMO came up with a very creative insight, with the message “Dirt is good”. This made it easier for fussy mothers across Asia to accept and believe that letting children play and get dirty is a way to help them learn and draw valuable lessons.

Identifying customer insights accurately can help a business solve many important business problems and gives it the flexibility to respond to market changes. We hope this article on is a customer insight and the 6 steps to build customer insights from Mona Media will be useful and help you succeed more in business.

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