Consumer insights are used by companies to interpret data from consumer behavior and spending trends to better inform their marketing decisions or business strategies as a whole.
Businesses can discover consumer insights from a variety of sources, including their own marketing initiatives, customer relationship management (CRM) software, or by partnering with data analytics providers like Envestnet | Yodlee. By using data analytics, important consumer insights can inform important business decisions and improve the overall customer experience.
What Are Consumer Insights and Why Are They Important?
Consumer insights are sets of data gathered on trends in human behaviors across digital channels. The typical consumer journey in today’s digital world sees consumers using an array of devices and research methods to ultimately make purchases. The data that’s generated every day from thousands of digital touchpoints is not always structured and readable for human understanding.
Through data analytics, consumer insights can be extracted into actionable sets of information to give businesses a comprehensive understanding of who their consumers are, and how they can appeal to their behaviors throughout the customer journey.
By understanding what types of information consumers are looking for, how they look for it, and why they choose to purchase, businesses can improve the customer experience by presenting consumers the information they need, when they need it, and where they’re most likely to find it.
What’s The Difference Between Market Research and Consumer Insights?
Market research and consumer insights differ in the type of information they give about consumers.
Market research is used by businesses to gather information about what is happening in a particular market. This research can include market sizes, needs, trends, competitors and customers. Market research reports provide statistics to strengthen a business's knowledge about the state of a market, and key business insights.
Consumer insights go one step further and provide both market data and the key reasons behind certain trends in consumer behavior. Knowing those drivers is much more valuable than only having statistics driven market research reports, and adds deeper context and actionable information on market and consumer activity.
What Are Some Consumer Insights Examples?
If your business notices a market trend, and has the consumer insights to offer a data driven way to better understand why that trend is happening, you can adjust your marketing and business strategies accordingly to ensure you’re meeting the demands and needs of your customer base.
Conducting consumer research can reveal a broad range of insights on behaviors, and can be gathered in a variety of ways including focus groups, social listening, or predictive analytics.
Some of the insights businesses can look for and take away from consumer research backed by data analytics include:
- Whether or not the customer journey is too complex
- If new products emerged from competitors
- Customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction with service post-purchase
Consumer Insights in Action
Understanding consumer behavior at a deeper level enables companies to create highly personalized marketing campaigns opposed to generic messages found in mass marketing.
While consumer insight data can be used to help businesses find a way to offer solutions that actually solve customer’s problems, or just associate a product or service with consumer interests, it’s a very effective way to stand out from competitors.
Using Consumer Reports Insights Panels
A consumer reports insights panel is essentially a focus group with the goal of collecting and analyzing as much information about consumer sentiment regarding a product or service as possible. This type of customer research is beneficial since it’s real data on how people feel about product or service, and gives companies the opportunity to identify customer segments based on personas and demographics.
AI Powered Consumer Insights Are The Future
Deciphering consumer insights from the complex sets of data they come in is key to getting any value from them, and businesses are increasingly bringing on data scientists and specialists to their analytics teams to help with the effort.
Having AI powered consumer insights has become imperative to keep up consumer demand for highly personalized product or solution recommendations, and is the future customer research.
Tech companies like Spotify, Amazon, and Netflix leverage AI and machine learning technologies to present consumer’s tailored product or service offerings based on their unique preferences gathered in consumer research. By creating more personalized customer experiences with their brands, they have a serious advantage over their competitors.
As consumer insights keep informing marketing campaigns and business strategies, expect to see more personalized product and service offerings across different industries. The FinTech landscape has been a breeding ground for providing highly relevant banking solutions to customers, and will continue to be a leading industry in showcasing the power of consumer insight data.
How Envestnet | Yodlee Enables Businesses to Leverage Consumer Insights
Envestnet | Yodlee is a market leader in data aggregation and data analytics solutions that provides ready-to-use data to businesses so they can start unlocking the powers of consumer insights. No matter how little or extensive data science expertise and experience a company has, Envestnet | Yodlee’s data is consistently delivered in user friendly formats so extracting actionable insights is made easy.
Using the data in their consumer research, companies can start discovering valuable consumer insights to drive better decision making with timely, unique, and accurate data. Following Envestnet | Yodlee’s data promise, all data provided is de-identified to protect consumer privacy and comply with strict security standards for secure data sharing.
