Customer Insightsfor Better Brand Identity

The drastic changes that every industry has undergone over the last couple of years are reason enough to take measures to future-proof your business. Your brand must be able to ride every shift, and every twist and turn, that the market can bring. And one way to do this is to keep an eye on what your consumer thinks and feels.

Gathering consumer insights is one way to do this. Consumer insight is the way in which you interpret and understand the behavior, feedback, and data that you gather from your customers. Conclusions derived from these insights can be useful in key aspects of any business, such as product development and customer support. It can also aid in getting a better picture of your customer health score, or how healthy your customer's relationship is with your brand.

When done right, brands can enhance the way they communicate with customers, which in turn, will affect and change consumer behavior, increase conversions, and build better brand identity.

Customer Insights for Better Brand Identity

There are key questions that you need to pose in order to create a productive dialogue with your customers.

• What do you think are we doing right?
• What do you like about our products and services, and our brand in general?
• In what aspects can we improve on?
• What things do you deem most important right now?
• What do you like about the products and services that our competitors offer?

You do not necessarily have to directly ask your customers these questions. There are various methods of doing so, and I will get to that later. The answers you gather can help you develop a brand strategy, and solidify your relationship with people who find value in your brand and what you have to offer. It can also prompt you when it’s time to rebrand.

How will customer insights improve your brand identity?

Smoothen customer's journey

Before a customer decides to buy your product or service, they go through the following stages: awareness, knowledge, interest, preference, and action. Customer insights can streamline the transitions between these stages — or better yet, eliminate these stages altogether. When you know what motivates your customer, it will be easier to strategize in making your brand known, showing that you can be relied on, and that you add value.

Keep track of customer habits

There are various ways to identify customer habits. It can be derived from general psychological and behavioral ideas about why customers respond a certain way, or from use cases from existing customer datasets.

Observing which type of images are shared most by customers, for example, is a good way to get insight on what sparks the interest of customers most.

Get a clearer customer picture

Customer insights let you know who your customers are and why they arrive at certain decisions. You can get an idea as to your customer's needs, desires, buying habits, and aspirations from various means, such as quantitative data, mentions and conversations on social media, and customer surveys, among others.

How do you gather customer insights?

Feedback surveys

These questionnaires are a great way to gain insight into how customers perceive your brand. You can either get feedback on your brand's overall performance, or zoom in on a particular product or service.

Behavioral data

Using marketing analytics tools, you can acquire information as to what triggers your customers to buy or drop off. This way, you can get an insight into any blockers that you may have in your marketing strategy.

Customer Reviews

Not all customers leave reviews. But in the odd times that they do, brands must do due diligence in taking them into account. You should also maximize these opportunities to start conversations with customers to get to know them better.

Sentiment Surveys

These brief questionnaires are designed to give brands an overall feel as to how their customers like their product, or their experience with the brand. Sentiment surveys usually use scales, like or dislike buttons, emoji faces, or star ratings.

A/B Testing

One of the best ways to determine which features perform best, and where, is A/B testing. If you want to test out two versions of an advertisement, A/B testing lets you show one version to a certain group, and the other version to another. And then, see which one converts more.

Conversations on social media

By tracking and monitoring mentions, tags, industry-related keywords, even competitor-related keywords, you can gather information as to how people talk about your brand, and what they think of it. The data you gather from these conversations can help build your brand identity and help you tailor your strategy to these trends.

Support Tickets

You can also gather great customer insights from your support team. Feedback from customers as to where they are having difficulties or issues is a great source of data when determining areas for improvement.

Chatbot data

Just like support tickets, chatbot data is also a great source of data on common issues and the difficulties that customers encounter.

Final Thoughts

Customer insights are all about taking care of your side of the relationship with customers and building your brand identity in the process. You power your brand by constantly listening, opening conversations, and making adjustments.

Using customer insights to build a better brand identity entails constant, effective, and lasting connections with customers.