Marketers always have questions: what is getting our customer’s attention and why? What are our competitors doing that our customers find interesting? Is there anything happening in the cultural zeitgeist that’s affecting customer perception? Could we be doing something different to be more relatable or relevant to our audience? Are we losing our customer’s attention? Are we meeting a need or solving a problem? If not, how can we?
There are a lot of pieces that go into brand awareness and reputation and asking these questions helps you get a fuller picture. But you don’t just want data – you want the information that makes both the answers and the next step clear. Your decisions are only as good as your data. What do you need to know about your customers to make better businesses decisions and how can you find data and make meaning from it?
The top best customer insights tools for actionable strategies
Here are the best customer insights tools that will help you drive more business and better customer retention
1. Google public research tools
Based on our search histories, browser data, and other Google Intel, Google is a huge – and underrated – the driver of customer insight. Their set of customer insights tools can help you better understand every part of your customer’s experience with your brand, including company web site performance, customer behavior analysis, digital experience, and more.
- YouTube Analytics: This dashboard helps you see more than just views and engagement and offers deeper insight into customer experiences. The Audience Retention tool allows you play your brand’s video alongside a graph showing retention, which can help you discover why and when your audience stopped watching your last video ad to help you create campaign changes that drive higher engagement.
- Google Consumer Survey: With this tool, you can conduct your own market research. Many companies use the insight gained from these direct to consumer surveys to create more meaningful job orders and requests for work from creative teams. Insight direct from the customer gathered by a business can be a benefit in developing your next set of campaign assets.
- Google Trends: This tool lets you see the interest in certain search terms over time so you can have better insight into customer interest and engagement with topics. This can help businesses in tangible ways from SEO strategy to blog topics to product launches.
2. Social Mention
Continuous overall monitoring is an important part of your insight approach. This tool gives you insight into what your customers are talking about on social media. You can easily track who’s using certain keywords, hashtags, or brand names to get a feel for what’s popular and trending. Since social media happens in real-time, this can give you actionable insight that lets you respond to the market faster and more effectively.
3. Facebook Audience Insight
Facebook is no longer just a tool that people use to check up on their college friends or post vacation pictures. People find jobs on Facebook, they use Facebook Marketplace to conduct business, and it functions as a nearly self-contained, one-stop-shop part of the internet. For this reason, it’s important to understand your audience’s presence on Facebook to help you more effectively communicate. According to the Hootsuite blog, “Facebook Audience Insights gives you a ton of data on your target demographic, which will help you laser-target your ads. And better targeting means you only pay to reach the people who are most likely to become customers. It can also help you tailor your posts to ensure you’re providing the right content, in the right voice, and at the right time to best connect with the followers you already have. You can get high-level information about your followers like age and gender. Or you can get more detailed insights like job titles, hobbies, and relationship status.” This kind of insight is key for making the most of your marketing reach on Facebook as a specific channel and fully benefit from the value of engaging customers there.
The importance of using customer insights tools
From social media to the larger internet, understanding the behavior, intent, and interests of customers is foundational in creating engaging marketing. The key to better business is a better understanding of your customer. In order to make effective changes, you need to know what to change and why. The right information gives you tangible ways and ideas for changes that will make an impact. Having more customer data can help you better understand how to approach your customer engagement strategy. The right customer insight research techniques will you turn into the information you need to answer your customer questions and progress your business strategy in smart and sound ways.
How can you unlock fresh insight that will help you drive more business and better understand how to approach customers? The right customer insights tools make it possible. Considering exploring some of these insight resources in your organization.