Some useful advice on Consumer Intelligence for marketing and insights professionals going into 2021.
Consumer Intelligence is the process by which marketing and insights professionals obtain and analyze information gleaned from customers regarding a specific brand’s image, or products and services, in order to put together a more cohesive picture of said customers. By doing so, brands can better their relationship with consumers and improve their content strategies accordingly. How marketers actually do the first part - the information gleaning part - is ever-evolving due to better, and more sophisticated softwares being developed for the social intelligence market. And it’s vitally important that you know a few things about this gradual transition moving forward. With the heavier reliance on digital marketing, and emphasis on methods of audience segmentation based on data from social media, anyone who misses out on this Consumer Intelligence train will find themselves at a steep disadvantage moving into 2021.
There’s so much data online these days, specifically data on profiles/personas, audience groups/tribes, and the actual feedback companies receive in reaction to a marketing campaign or rebranding effort. It’s becoming easier to actually obtain this knowledge due to social listening platforms, such as Digimind’s own native AI-supported tool (of the same name), but the increasingly more difficult thing for professionals, these days, is actually making key insights from all the data points and statistics. And that's the main challenge for 2021! The future of social intelligence is here - and improving every day - it’s how we all manage these tools for Consumer Intelligence that’ll make or break the next generation of businesses as we enter this bright, and uncertain, new year.
So with some holidays already here, and others fast approaching, as well as the New Year itself (goodbye 2020, and good riddance), let’s take a brief look at some ways you can make the most out of certain methods of Consumer Intelligence, and then return to wrapping things up before that most-coveted Zoom holiday office party Wanda’s been working so hard to organize.
If you want to take of advantage of more holiday social listening goodness, then check out our
latest piece on Social Media Monitoring. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!
In this new generation of brand-customer engagement, companies must understand how people feel, what they want (and don’t want), how they respond to certain trends, what they’re feeling in real time, and most importantly, just what can you understand about their preferences and personal sentiments based on their feedback. One could argue that there’s no point in brands cozying up to consumers because shopping behavior is something one can more or less grok if they pay attention to the current market. But this is a shallow way to view both human beings, and the field of marketing itself. Brand empathy, whether businesses know it or not, is the direction 2021 is taking us as a popular method of communicating with consumers.
A huge component of being able to pull this off and win the hearts and minds of consumers through successful engagement is to know them as best as possible, and to help facilitate this process Consumer Intelligence offers a few valuable tidbits that you might want to write down (or at least copy and paste for your own reference) and familiarize yourselves with:
Establishing a “Narrative” - Creating a brand image and reputation that's known for its respect of users, responsibility to those that are loyal to the brand, and can make them feel “special”, takes the necessary data that only Consumer Intelligence can provide via social listening.
Business Strategy Based on Profiles - Every facet of a company needs to shift its priorities around what the market demands. And since the market is made up of people, it’ll be crucial to know who those people are, and how best to tell your - and their - story.
Consumer Targeting - By segmenting these consumers into smaller, more manageable groups, marketing and insights professionals are not only encouraged, but should be mandated to target specific audiences in ways that’ll optimize your brand’s marketing position. Gender, location, occupation and income group, age, emotional sentiment, and more.
Positioning Within the Industry: And speaking of optimizing a brand’s marketing position, businesses must also determine where they belong within their industry in order to improve any and all Consumer Intelligence efforts. Knowing what your competition’s customer base is can help you form stronger marketing strategies that include those groups.
Execution: Combined with all of the above, and using all you’ve learned from the general feedback from your brand’s previous engagement efforts, not forgetting to curate the actual execution of your brand’s empathy plan through Consumer Intelligence work is the most helpful thing you can do. If you’ve truly dedicated your team to knowing all you can about your consumers, your competitors, your industry, and your brand itself, then this last part shouldn’t be too much of a stretch. Remember, making the most out of your consumer feedback requires the previous tidbits above, and you’re only doing yourselves a huge disservice by picking and choosing what you “believe” suits your needs. Use it all, no matter the time or resources.
If you’re going to stick to just one New Year’s Resolution for 2021, it should be to adopt more comprehensive, time-tested methods of social listening, and that includes learning all you can about your target audience through consumer intelligence. It’s not the only way, but it’s definitely one of the best ways to help improve your brand’s business during a hard time. This holiday season, be good to yourselves, be good to your customers, and be better for next year with social intelligence that makes the world a better (or at the very least, more sympathetic) place for marketing.