10 Tactical Tips To Uncover Real Customer Insights

For any business, knowing as much about your customer is critical for a number of reasons. Whether that’s to make accurate business decisions to simply utilising the data to help build relationships with your customers.

Customer insights can prove very useful for any business, whatever the size and for however long they’ve been in existence on the market. According to Microsoft, organisations leverage customer behavior to generate insights, these companies end up gaining 85% of sales growth.

Therefore, it’s essential for any business to focus their attention on how they collect customer data and what that data can reveal when it comes to the company’s performance for sales and general success. This guide will help your business discover ten tactical tips to uncover real customer insights that are crucial for your company’s growth this year and beyond.

What Are Customer Insights?

Customer insights are patterns in customer data that you can gather from various sources, whether that be your own social media analytical dashboard, to sales data you’ve acquired already through previous purchases.

These discoveries allow you to understand your customer beyond just their customer number. You can gather information about their intentions and how they’ve come to make said purchase.  It’s also a great opportunity to understand the challenges your customers face and how you might be able to provide a solution to these challenges.

Customer insights can be valuable information to make the best decisions for your business and to plan for future marketing campaigns to maximize their success.

How Are Customer Insights Beneficial To A Business?

Customer insights offer a whole host of valuable benefits for your business. To take your business’s customer experience to the next level, here are a few reasons why using consumer insight is so important.

Reduces Friction In The Sales Funnel

The sales funnel is one that is different for every customer, meaning it’s useful to have customer insight so that you can minimize the number of issues that occur during their experience with your business.

Reducing friction in the sales funnel is going to help your customers navigate it a lot more efficiently and with fewer hiccups along the way. A seamless customer experience is one that is really going to make a difference for many of your consumers.

Improves Your Products And Services

With customer insight, it can give you more intel into how well your products or services are performing when it comes to the user. Perhaps they’re missing something in particular that you haven’t yet developed or manufactured? The more you can satisfy and cater to your customers, the more they’ll be willing to buy off you.

Customer insights can help uncover information that was previously unknown to your business.

Personalizes Your Digital Marketing Campaigns

Personalisation to your digital marketing campaigns is crucial when growing your business. Every dollar spent on marketing is something that you want to maximize when it comes to the ROI you generate. Customer insights are a great way of accessing information that determines what direction you take next with each digital marketing campaign.

A lot of marketing can often come down to trial and error until you find a formula that sticks. Data can help achieve that.

10 Tactical Tips To Uncover Real Customer Insights

Now that you know about the importance of real customer insights, what tactical tips are useful in helping gather this intel for your business? Here are ten ways to get you started.

Look At What Customers Are Searching For

There’s a lot of information that can be gathered simply by looking at what your customers are searching for online. Use Google and other search engines to find some of the top search queries and keyword research that’s relative to your business in particular or your business industry.

By having knowledge of what your customers are looking for, you can tailor both your product creation and promotional efforts to better target your consumers and any potential leads.

Conduct Focus Groups And Online Feedback Forms To Discover Customer Needs

When it comes to interacting with your customers and those that could be potential customers, it’s good to utilize the practice of focus groups and online feedback forms. Using a site like 123formbuilder can provide online form templates that don’t need coding and as a result, can be created by just about anyone, despite their online and IT proficiency.

Focus groups can be done in person or you could always do them online via Skype or Zoom, for example. These are also great for gathering information more freely and with less structure than online feedback forms.

Use Customer Insights Software

For customer insights, using a consumer insights software is a great way to gather all of your intel in one place and to have technology do all the work for you. Something like Attest is a great platform for gathering data efficiently and being able to access it from a central dashboard.

Software nowadays for businesses is also a lot more affordable and accessible for start-ups and small companies. Attest’s platform in particular is being utilized by the likes of some big brands such as Ocado and Wise.

Look Up The Latest Consumer Statistics Relative To Your Business Or Industry.

There is a lot of data already available online through the medium of statistics and articles that showcase many of the latest stats related to your business niche. It’s always a good idea to look up the latest consumer statistics to help understand whether the information and knowledge you have on your customers are accurate and up to date.

Many marketing campaigns and product developments can fail in their success because the data is outdated or isn’t accurate for the current needs of consumers.

Use Google Trends

Google Trends is a very handy tool that this search engine provides to businesses existing currently on the world wide web. The tool works by simply entering a term or topic into the search bar and seeing what pops up that’s perhaps trending in relation to that word(s) you’ve entered.

This tool is beneficial because it gives you a focus and a direction to head in when you maybe don’t know where to go next with your business decisions. The major benefit of Google Trends is that it’s free to use, so you’d be missing out on a treat for your company with this tool.

Track Customer Behavior Via Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a go-to tool because it’s free and available to anyone who owns a website. You can find a lot of data by simply looking at the traffic that comes onto your site.

This analytics platform works by simply entering coding into your HTML of the site and then waiting for the data to trickle in. There are plenty of useful metrics that can be revealed by using this platform for consumer behavior and what they’re interested in most.

Use Heatmaps To Discover What Your Customers Are Looking At

Heatmaps are another tool worth investing in when it comes to your website and understanding what exactly your customers are looking at. This works by showing heat signals on your site so you’ll be able to see what customers click on the most or spend the most time browsing or using their mouse to explore.

It’s a small investment that can tell you a lot about your own website and what advantages your website has, as well as its weaknesses.

Discover Brand Mentions Via Social Media

Brand mentions are a good one when it comes to your social media platforms. Who is talking about your business and in what context? There’s a lot that you can understand from your consumers, especially as they tend to be a lot more vocal online. 

They also tend to be a lot more honest in their opinion of your brand, so it’s a good way to help identify the pinch points in your business and what you might need to improve upon.

Understand The Stages Of Your Buyer’s Journey

Every buyer goes through a different stage to get to the purchase and after-sales point of the business. From doing their research online to discovering your brand and browsing your products or services. 

It’s good to understand what each stage of your buyer’s journey is and what stages might require more from you as a business to encourage them to move through the sales funnel.

Conduct Customer Onboarding Surveys

Finally, customer onboarding surveys are very handy when it comes to knowing how well your onboarding process is. It can help identify where customers might have had friction in their customer experience so that you can improve it for the next customers who onboard.

There are a lot of tactical tips that you can utilize when it comes to gaining customer insights. Make use of the ones mentioned above to help improve your business’s efforts and to hopefully improve sales performance in 2022.

Author Bio:

Natalie Redman (LinkedIn)

Freelance writer for many clients across multiple industries. Natalie has two years of copywriting experience. Natalie has a wide range of experience copywriting for web pages for businesses across many industries. She’s also an owner of two blog websites and a Youtube content creator.