The era of 4.0 industry, where humanity is constantly “overloaded” with the amount of information received daily, challenges Marketers in seeking customer insights. 

Receiving an overwhelming amount of information creates obstacles in identifying target audiences and collecting customer data lead to uncertainty in knowing what customers truly desire. 

What is customer insight?

A deeper analysis of the phrase "insight" reveals that it is a combination of "in," which refers to the hidden depths within, and "sight," which refers to things we can see on the outside, touch, or perceive with our minds.

Customer insight is generally tacit truths about customer behavior and preferences. Businesses need to find insights to deeply know about the thoughts, needs and feelings of their customers. From there, businesses can adjust to come up with appropriate business strategies. Besides helping businesses better understand their customers, customer insight also serves as a bridge for the relationship between business and consumers. That will increase the interaction, the ability to convey the message and develop the profit for the business. 

Why is Customer Insight important for a Marketing campaign?

Customer insight is always a core criterion for marketing campaigns and also the determining factor for customers’ purchasing decisions and service usage. Consumers tend to support a brand’s products or services when they feel understood and their needs are handled 

Marketers, who put customers at the center of their strategies, often utilized various tools to gain a deeper understanding of their customers. By doing so, they can create a comprehensive picture of their customers and their preferences, enabling businesses to accurately identify the characteristics and personalities of the target customer. 

In the following articles, M&M Communications will review the five most common tools that can help you easily research and uncover Customer Insight, enabling you to devise the most effective customer engagement strategies. 

1. YouTube Analytics 

YouTube is a fantastic platform for sharing your videos with people all around the world, with just a few simple steps. Numerous studies show that Youtube retains its users at a relatively high rate for a period of time. However, have you ever wondered who your Youtube Channel’s audience is? Youtube Analytics is a tool that can help you analyze the necessary data for your Youtube Channel in detail. 

To define your YouTube channel's target audience, click on the "demographics" tab, which will help you find information about the location and age of the people who watched the video. Once you accurately determine your audience, you can use that information to meet their needs with more relevant ideas.

This analysis also reveals the average watch time for your videos, which Google uses to assess whether viewers find your content interesting or not. If the viewer retention rate is high, your channel's search ranking will improve. Conversely, if your viewer retention is medium to low (below 25%), you consider reducing the duration of your videos.

By looking at the analytics data on Youtube Analytics, you can discover when viewers are interacting with your content and when they tend to drop off, allowing you to take actions to improve viewer retention in those critical moments.

2. Google Survey  

Google Survey is a tool that allows users to create forms, surveys, and polls to better understand customers, as well as track viewer engagement on a specific topic. With Google Survey, you can actively collect the data you want to access, from basic content such as personal information: age, industry, and gender. The target audiences will receive the form and they only need to select or provide the correct information.

After the data collection process is complete, Google Survey will assist you in statistics of the results in the form of graphs or in summarizing information in various formats. This is essential for writing a summary of your primary target audience

3. Google Trends

Google Trends helps you validate your assumptions about current consumer trends to gain in-depth customer data. Additionally, if you are still confused about the potential topics to interest users, Google Trends can assist you with that. At Google Trends, you can also use the "related search" feature to discover current popular customer trends.

For example, if you are working for a brand in fashion and want to identify the outstanding trends in 2022 to generate ideas for the next article, you can Google Trends to explore current fashion trends that are trending at the moment. By doing so, you can verify whether your assumptions about customer preferences are correct or not by comparing them with the popular trends shown on Google Trends.

In addition, Google Trends also helps you to fully explore the niche markets in your field. It is a great condition for you to create the right content once you know the factors that users are currently interested in.

For example, when you notice that your customers are highly interested in minimalist fashion styling, you can publish articles related to basic color combinations in outfits and guide on how to mix and match simple clothing items

4. Google Analytics  

Google Analytics is an online website analysis tool provided for free by Google, aimed at creating detailed statistics, tracking, measuring, analyzing traffic, and most importantly, providing Advertisers with depth insight into website performance. Additionally, using Google Analytics, you can also find out where your visitors are coming from and how much time they spend on your website.

One of the most prominent and well-known features is the “target channel”. This is a particularly important function for marketers and retail businesses. Google Analytics allows you to set up a list of URLs that customers click on when they complete a purchase. This feature allows you to find out how many customers are actually going through the purchase process.

If a customer is still hesitating at any stage of the purchase, you can also identify that and adjust your strategy to make the shopping experience smoother.

Furthermore, the analysis of customer behavior on the website is equally important. The tool will display the keywords people use to find your website. That will help advertisers discover the websites that are attracting the most traffic in the market.

5. Facebook Audience Insights  

Audience Insights is different from Page Insights and customer demographic reports as it provides information fields such as gender, age, relationship status, lifestyle, and work. Additionally, this tool also reports the number of likes, purchasing activity, and Facebook usage.

Step 1: Access the tool

Go to the Ads Manager and click on the tool. You will find it in the top right from the drop-down list, select Audience Insights or use the following URL to directly access Audience Insights: www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights

Step 2: Select the object 

Select the audience with the data you want to analyze including everyone on Facebook, people connected to your page, or custom audience.

Conclusion 

By using appropriate  Customer Insight research tools, businesses will have the opportunity to better understand the habits and purchasing behavior of their target customer group, as well as save considerable cost for large-scale market research.

Through this article, M&M Communications hopes to help you have a clearer understanding of these valuable tools that businesses can utilize to gain better insights into their customers.