So what might insights mean for your business? What tools can you implement to maximise your budgets and meaningfully connect with your audiences?
What are marketing insights?
Insights are a valuable piece of information that can be directly acted upon to help your business plan. They’re generally things we aren’t conscious of–patterns that go unnoticed in our regular lives. Comedians are great with insights, consider how they show us moments we didn’t know were shared. Collectively having us exclaim, “hey, I do that!”.
In branding, we collect insights through market research and data analysis. This information not only informs the creative process, but your entire business operation can benefit. By understanding your audiences and market, you can create stronger connections and ultimately build brand loyalty.
Understanding your Insights
The purpose of insights is to minimise risk by ensuring there is value in what you are offering. As well as confirming there is a market for your product or service before you put in all the hard work to create it.
One can easily confuse insights with data, knowledge, or general feedback; or use them all interchangeably. Although data has the potential to become an insight, data analysis by itself is nothing more than a collection of statistics. Only a living, breathing, thinking human being is capable of transforming knowledge into insight.
Benefits of Insights
Long gone are the days when a company would put out a single message to its audience. Hoping this single message would appeal to all the many types of people who would become customers.
Because of the proliferation of social media and digital marketing, we can now design our messaging to best suit each audience. We can optimise the format for individual channels. Insights help inform decisions like this, and have many other benefits.
Further benefits of insights include:
- Intimately understanding your consumers, their behaviours and motivations
- Providing improved and more personalised customer experiences
- Having a unique position over your competition
- Maximising ROI through minimise expenses and improving performance
- Building a strong brand with customer loyalty
- Discovering new opportunities and revenue sources
- Anticipating the future
Research & Insight Tools and Formats
Depending on your requirements, you may want to look at qualitative data, quantitative data, or a mixture of both. We have included a few examples of what we do at Fellow:
Surveys
As you likely know, this format involves distributing surveys among your target audience. The survey can be designed to collect many forms of data. It is best used as an initial step to gain a general understanding. Findings from these surveys can then inform the rest of the insights process.
Might be of interest – Tech Radar, Best Survey Tools
Video Interviews
Here we source respondents and interview them via video call. This is a great way to collect qualitative information such as audiences attitudes, values, and motivations. This format allows you to gain more explanatory answers than broader survey research.
Video Interview tools – Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams
Social analysis
Reviewing your own channels as well as those of your competitors. This includes visual style analysis, top performing content breakdowns, and a review of messaging and language. We can also review organic social media conversations, providing a top-line demographic breakdown of your audience.
SEO Analysis
Here we identify what is driving associations and web traffic to competitors. We understand search patterns of how audiences are searching for relevant terms.
SEO Tools – Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMRush and MOZ
The Bottom Line
Great brand strategy is built on robust data and human insight. While insights may feel like a hindrance to your timelines and budgets, they save you much more in the long run. By intimately understanding what your offer means to your audiences, you can effectively connect with them and build brand loyalty. This removed any guesswork and minimising your risk of failure.
At Fellow we believe in being insights-led, so that every creative decision is based on fact and evidence. If you want to talk to someone about gaining insights for your business contact us.
