In today’s highly competitive online marketplace, consumer insights serve as a roadmap toward long-term growth. They offer a candid glimpse into a customer’s opinions, experiences and emotions, providing brands with clear insights into their strengths and areas needing improvement.
But how exactly do you gather this data and how can you harness it to transform your business?
In this blog, we delve into the following topics:
• What Are Consumer Insights?
• The Role of Customer Insights in Business Growth
• What Is Customer Sentiment Analysis?
• How To Perform Sentiment Analysis
Read on and learn how to perform customer insights analysis for continuous business growth.
What Are Consumer Insights?
Customer insights refer to the in-depth understanding of customers’ behaviors, preferences, needs and perceptions gained through data analysis, market research and observation. These insights are derived from various sources such as customer feedback, interactions, surveys, social media interactions and transactional data.
Customer insights provide actionable information that can be used to:
• Improve products or services• Enhance customer experiences
• Personalize marketing strategies
• Improve resource allocation
• Make informed business decisions
By analyzing customer data and patterns, businesses can identify trends, predict future behavior and tailor their offerings to meet customer expectations effectively.
Consumer insights can be categorized into several types:
User Habits
• Behavioral Patterns: This includes how customers interact with your website or app, their browsing patterns, time spent on specific pages and actions taken (clicks, downloads, purchases).
• Usage Frequency: Understanding how often customers use your products or services, how long they stay engaged and their recurring behaviors provides insights into product stickiness and user satisfaction.<
• Device Preferences: Customer insights can also shed light on the devices and platforms customers prefer to use, whether it’s mobile, desktop or specific operating systems, influencing your user experience design.
Product Features
• Feature Adoption: Customer insights help identify which product features or functionalities are most valued and frequently used. This informs product development decisions, prioritizing enhancements or new features based on customer demand.
• Feature Usage Patterns: Customer insights can reveal usage patterns and trends related to product features, such as popular workflows, feature combinations and customization preferences.
Customer Type
• Demographic Segmentation: Customer insights enable businesses to group users based on factors like age, gender, income level, education and location. This segmentation helps tailor messaging and product offerings to appropriate segments.
• Psychographic Segmentation: Understanding customer values, lifestyles, interests and motivations through psychographic insights allows for deeper personalization.
The Role of Customer Insights in Business Growth
Now that we’ve answered “what are consumer insights?” let’s explore why they’re the secret to success in today’s online marketplace.
• Improved Product Development
According to a HubSpot survey, 77% of respondents stated that a product or service that meets their needs is the main reason they stay loyal to a business (HubSpot).
Customer insights provide valuable feedback that can be used to refine existing products or services and develop new offerings that better align with consumer needs and preferences.
• Enhanced Customer Experience
Research shows that 81% of buyers are inclined to make repeat purchases following a positive shopping encounter. However, 61% are willing to switch to a competitor after encountering just one poor experience (HubSpot).
By understanding customer pain points, businesses can tailor their interactions, communications and support services to deliver a personalized and seamless experience.
• Targeted Marketing Strategies
Modern customers not only prefer tailored content but also expect it. In fact, 80% of consumers are more inclined to make a purchase when brands provide personalized experiences (Epsilon).
Customer insights empower businesses to segment their customer base based on user behavior and interests. Once they’re classified into different groups, you can deliver targeted offers, recommendations or messages that resonate with individual users and inspire action.
By leveraging personalized content, you make users feel valued at every stage of the sales funnel. This, in turn, fosters loyalty and boosts customer lifetime value.
• Optimized Pricing and Promotions
About 78% of consumers state that fair pricing is a key consideration when selecting which brand to purchase from (HubSpot).
Customer insights help businesses identify which customer segments are more price-sensitive and which are willing to pay a premium for certain features or benefits. This information allows companies to adjust prices accordingly to maximize profitability.
Customer insights inform businesses about the impact of various promotional pricing tactics, such as discounts, bundling or loyalty programs. This helps them refine promotional strategies for maximum sales and customer retention.
• Reduced Churn and Complaints
Customer insights shed light on any issues or concerns your audience may have. By monitoring customer feedback, you can promptly address these issues and preserve brand reputation.
Brands can expect to spend five to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. By reducing churn through issue resolution, businesses save on acquisition costs and improve overall profitability.
• Innovation and Growth Opportunities
Customer insights are an ongoing source of feedback and learning. They reveal untapped opportunities for innovation and growth, guiding businesses in exploring new markets, partnerships and revenue streams.
What Is Customer Sentiment Analysis?
Customer sentiment analysis is a data processing technique that uses machine learning. It aims to analyze text-based data to examine and interpret the emotions, opinions and attitudes expressed within it. These textual sources include customer reviews, survey responses, social media posts and feedback forms.
Sentiment analysis classifies customer sentiment as positive, negative or neutral. It can further group sentiments into specific emotions like happiness, anger, sadness or excitement.
Insights from online reviews analysis reveal how consumers truly feel about your offerings so you can make strategic changes that drive growth.
How To Perform Sentiment Analysis
A customer sentiment analysis involves several key steps:
Step 1: Gather Customer Data
First, you need a rich pool of customer data. There are several online platforms or sources from which you can collect reviews.
• Customer Surveys and Feedback Forms
Surveys offer an effective means of obtaining precise answers to specific questions. They can be distributed to large audiences, yielding valuable insights effortlessly. Surveys are simple to create, offering clear, quantifiable data with minimal time and effort.
Tips:
• Keep survey forms short and concise to avoid overwhelming customers.
• Use simple and easy-to-understand language. Avoid using jargon or technical terms that may confuse respondents.
• If you need to ask a complex question, break it down into smaller, simpler questions. This makes it easier for respondents to understand and answer accurately.
• Consider automating feedback forms to be sent when customers finish a purchase or a free trial. Research indicates that up to 70% of reviews stem from post-transactional review request emails (BrightLocal).
• Review Platforms
Claim and optimize your business profile on top review sites, such as Google Business Profile (GBP), Yelp, TripAdvisor, Trustpilot and Better Business Bureau (BBB).
Make it easy for customers to leave reviews by providing direct links to your review profiles or embedding review widgets on your website. For instance, GBP lets you create a shareable link that leads users directly to the review page. You can share this link on your email review requests or social media pages for greater visibility.
• Social Media Channels
Social media platforms such as X (previously) Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have transformed how brands approach customer insights analysis.
Begin by identifying mentions, comments and discussions related to your brand or industry. This can be done manually or by utilizing software that can track brand mentions across multiple platforms.
Share polls or open-ended questions on social media to gather feedback directly from your audience. Use engaging visuals and clear calls-to-action to encourage participation.
• Customer Support Interactions
Customer support tickets, emails and chat transcripts can reveal recurring themes or trends in customer concerns and feedback.
Implement a robust customer support ticketing system that centralizes all customer interactions, including emails, phone calls, live chats and social media messages. Then, categorize support tickets based on the nature of the inquiry, such as technical issues, product questions, billing concerns or general feedback.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) Surveys
NPS is a widely recognized metric that measures the likelihood of customers to recommend a company, product or service to others. It measures brand perception and overall customer satisfaction based on one question:
“How likely is it that you would recommend [Organisation X/Product Y/Service Z] to a friend or colleague?”
Ratings range from 0 (not at all likely) to 10 (extremely likely). A high NPS indicates satisfied and loyal customers who are likely to promote the brand, leading to increased customer retention, positive word-of-mouth marketing and, ultimately, business growth.
Step 2: Sort and Clean Your Data
Pre-process your review data to remove noise, special characters and duplicate entries that do not contribute to the analysis.
Noise includes HTML tags, emojis, non-alphanumeric characters and punctuation marks. Many customer sentiment analysis algorithms are incapable of interpreting special characters.
Additionally, be sure to transcribe any video or audio data. If you’re using a tool that lacks multilingual capabilities, you’ll need to translate your content.
Step 3: Analyze and Interpret
There are two ways to analyze customer review data:
1. Quantitative Analysis: Aggregate sentiment scores, calculate sentiment ratios (percentage of positive vs. negative reviews) and measure sentiment trends over time.
2. Qualitative Analysis: Read and interpret individual reviews in-depth. Look for common pain points, suggestions for improvement and positive feedback. Capture direct quotes or phrases that represent customer sentiments accurately.
Step 4: Visualize and Share Your Insights
Visual aids such as word charts, topic clusters and sentiment charts enable stakeholders to grasp key insights quickly.
Besides showing user sentiment, delve deeper into the factors driving these emotions and identify the necessary changes to enhance user satisfaction.
Step 5: Test Your Findings
The ultimate goal of online reviews analysis is to enhance your product and user experience. Test your product updates and evaluate their impact. Remember, customer needs and preferences are ever-evolving. Continuously monitor customer feedback to refine your strategies and gain a competitive advantage.
Empower Your Business With Valuable Consumer Insights
Leveraging customer insights lets you make data-driven decisions across departments, from product development and marketing to sales and customer support.
At Thrive Local, we help you streamline review collection and monitoring. Through meticulous customer insights analysis and reputation management, we assist brands in driving continuous growth.
Book a consultation now and enhance your digital marketing strategy.
