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Conducting Great Research – A Quick Guide to Consumer Insights

By ZAK

Consumer insights are crucial to any marketing strategy. It is those insights that make a campaign impact the right audience in advertising and design. Consumer insights were at the heart of the most iconic marketing campaigns because the brands behind them understood the importance of identifying the exact needs of their audience.

Consumer Insights companies and market research companies specialize in conducting significant research that provides brands with the data to construct holistic buyer personas.

In this post, we’ll cover the steps involved in obtaining great data.

  1. Focus On What Matters

Not all data is valued the same. You could collect data about absolutely anything, but that is not guaranteed to help your business with the challenges it is facing. Therefore, the first step in any excellent research strategy is defining the key strategic business questions you need to answer.

Marketing KPIs should always be tied to broader business goals. Are you trying to…

  • Develop a better understanding of your audience?
  • Focus on a new target group?
  • Raise sales for a particular consumer segment?
  • Shift brand perceptions?

Knowing what you want to achieve helps you and the market research companies you collaborate with stay focused on what matters.

  1. Create Personas and Map the Customer Journey

Without a clear target audience in mind, it’s easy to make too many assumptions based on a wealth of data. Before drawing insights from numbers and words, you should draft real-life buyer personas that bring the demographic to life. These could be based on actual conversations you have had with your ideal customers and will give your data context.

Mapping the customer journey is another crucial step. This allows brands to track every touchpoint at which they interact with consumers. To gain an even deeper insight, the customer journey may also involve the consumer’s day-to-day, leading them to their decisions about your brand.

  1. What Perceptions Are You Hoping to Shift?

Once you know your customers and their journey, it’s time to decide what about their feelings or perception you want to shift. This is where insights turn into creative messages, and you’ll come full circle to the initial objectives you’ve set for your research. What you discover in the data can offer a new twist on your initial thoughts and present new solutions.

  1. Find Smaller Niches for Your Consumers

Another way to get the most out of your consumer insights is by splitting your consumers into smaller groups. One buyer persona is seldom enough to cover your entire target audience. But through segmentation, you can narrow down your goals to specific customers. Is your research focusing on a new audience, perhaps, or on improving the loyalty of existing customers? Are you hoping to engage customers of a specific age group or gender more because sales in their segment have been lacking?

  1. Find the Story in the Data

Consumer insights might seem like purely numerical and tedious metrics, but they reveal fundamental truths about your audience and brand. Because of this, they are not just for researchers. Consumer insights can help every level of your organization, from customer service to marketing and top-level business decisions. That’s why it’s essential to translate data into visual aids and simple statements to tell the story behind the research and spark innovative ideas.

  1. Bring Back Into Context

Insights without context serve no one. They can only unleash their potential when brought back into context with your goals. They also rely on the skills of real people with different perspectives and backgrounds for the most valuable interpretation. A diverse team can help you unlock the full value of consumer insights. Customer-facing colleagues can combine their actual customer knowledge with the data they are presented with and offer helpful context to frame what you have learnt.

Consumer Insights Are a Social Science

Complex data can’t turn into the impactful understanding brands seek without that special human touch. It takes perspective and a thorough understanding of what audiences want from brands in this new age. This is where the expertise of consumer insight companies comes in.

ZAK is a market research company in London that works with a network of U-30 consumers to identify trends and shifting perceptions in the market. We know the people behind the data and help brands put their research into context.

Get in touch today to chat with us about your next study.