How to use Consumer Insights to Support Social Media Marketing Efforts

10 min readMay 13, 2021

Social media has become an integral part of business marketing strategies. Be it Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Tik Tok, users devote a specific time in a day to these platforms. 94% of digital consumers are active social media users. Consequently, this makes social media marketing (SMM) essential for businesses. However, the benefits of SMM have increased the competition on the platform. This calls for a modern-day strategy to target users effectively. Consumer insights play a major role in forming such strategies on social media.

Every business creates a product or service by keeping its ideal buyer in mind. However, the last few years have been a digital revolution. As a result, the perception and behavior of consumers have changed. They have become well-researched and more digitally savvy. Nobody gets convinced with general marketing strategies.

Thus, businesses are taking the help of consumer insights to understand a consumer better. Brands like Apple and Nike are coming up with unique marketing campaigns by understanding consumer insights. As a result, it positively affected their commercial success and brand value.

But how do you understand the ultimate truth of consumer’s requirements through social media? If you can’t wrap your head around it, we’re here to help you.

In this article, we are going to discuss some of the ways that you can use to gain consumer insights on social media. Keep reading to know the tips and tricks that’ll help you know your ideal customer in a better way. But, before we go ahead, let’s understand the basics of consumer insights and their impact on your marketing strategy. Let’s start!

What Are Consumer Insights and Why is it Important?

Consumer insight is the pool of analytics information about consumers gathered by a business to understand consumer behavior. It’s a field of study that focuses on understanding what consumers want. The consumer data is obtained by studying their behaviors and perceptions. In other words, businesses just try to analyze what their consumers need and why do they need it.

Why Are Consumer Insights Important?

The age of the Internet has opened interesting channels for businesses around the world. Digital transformation is now a key priority for businesses. Consequently, consumers have the access to the complete marketplace at their fingertips. The abundance of options provides them the facility of choice. For this reason, you can’t expect them to buy your products or services in an instant. They are more aware now. Therefore, they demand to know every piece of information before investing in a product or service.

This makes marketing difficult for businesses. Unless they start focusing on the consumers. They say the way to a consumer’s heart is through focusing on their needs, wants, and requirements.

But every business in the world is doing it.

So, How Do You Stand Out from the Competition?

The answer to this question is by studying the deep insights of the consumer’s behaviors and patterns. These interesting pieces of information of buyers help the businesses to form the right message for their audience. Businesses use those insights in their marketing strategy to provide consumers with what they want. Eventually, it results in better branding and an increase in revenue for the business.

But, What is Considered an Insight?

Any piece of information about the consumer doesn’t classify as an insight. It needs to meet certain criteria:

It needs to be discovered. An old or an already suspected piece of information is not an insight.
It needs to be an unrealized and unexpected reality about consumer behavior.
It needs to be relevant to your business or your customers. No matter how interesting it is, if it doesn’t help you streamline your business goals, it’s not an insight.
It needs to suggest an actionable step to take for the benefit of your business.
It needs to be the result of a subjective and deep analysis of consumer data.

Consumer insights include:

Social and demographic characteristics — It consists of a consumer’s age, gender, location, marital status, profession, and industry of work.
Personal interests and lifestyle patterns — It may consist of a consumer’s hobbies and goals.
Motivational factors for purchasing — Needs of customers help you detect purchase drivers.
Brand perception — It’s about how the views of your audience about your brand.

How Does Consumer Insights Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy?

As you know, consumer insights are studied to fuel up more potential in your marketing efforts. Let’s try to have a basic understanding of the ways it makes a difference in the marketing strategy of your business:

Consumer Insights Develop a Better Customer Journey

A customer journey reflects on the whole process of becoming a customer. It starts with the awareness stage and includes consideration, purchase, and retention ending up at the advocacy stage. An ideal customer follows the process and then becomes the customer.

Consumer insights help in shortening the length of the customer journey. Identifying the gaps between different stages improves the buying experience for users.

As covered by Forbes, Wayfair, a popular eCommerce company selling furniture and home goods, improved its customer experience by launching an app. Users can take a picture of furniture or home item they like. The app will identify a similar product on the website for them. Through this feature, Wayfair started getting amazing insights into the customer’s behavioral patterns. It got to know the customer’s taste, style preference, place of inspiration, etc. It combined all the insights to analyze their users. As a result, it led to a 50% increase in their customer retention that year.

It Strengthens the Buyer Persona

Every business knows the importance of creating an ideal buyer persona for its customers. It helps in creating a detailed model of every information about your buyer. As a result, you make a profile of the buyer that helps you strategize your marketing efforts.

Consumer insights add up to the model of your buyer persona in an even detailed manner. It provides you with a new bank of data about your customers that you don’t get otherwise. Moreover, it includes buying habits, sentiment analysis, customer experience surveys, social media mentions, and much more.

Consumer Insights Boost Personalization

Personalized marketing is no longer an option for businesses; it’s a necessity. A research by Epsilon states that 80% of consumers prefer personalized experiences while making a purchase.

But how do you personalize your communication with the customers?

Customer insights play a huge role in this process. In order to personalize content for customers, marketers require different data about them. They need to study the behavioral patterns, purchase tendencies, motivations, and lifestyle patterns.

Consumer insights help marketers with exactly that. It provides them with an insight into the customer’s mind and choices. Additionally, it answers the ‘why’ of their decisions. Businesses get to understand why their customers are choosing one product over another and what drives them to do so.

Several popular businesses swear by personalized marketing. Spotify is among the best examples. It has combined the traditional marketing methods with the modern-day strategy of consumer insights. Have a look at Spotify’s billboard campaign:

Source: Zoovu

Consumer Insight Redefine Purchase Motivations

No one makes a purchase for no reason. Every purchase is always backed up by a buyer’s intent. After all, it’s not just businesses that follow the approach of information collection. Consumers are also armed with a ton of data about the businesses.

The factors that lead them to make a decision about a purchase adds up to the buyer’s intent. It’s important for you to understand what drives them towards a purchase. To delve further into this, customer insights can help you. It brings out the low-profile factors that reflect the user’s purchase motivations.

It Defines Your Brand’s Perception Among the Audience

The audience of the market perceives you in a particular light and has made an image about your brand in their minds. The way they look at you is the audience’s perception of your brand.

It’s necessary to know what customers think about your business. Moreover, you can find out the pain points of your audience. It certainly helps you to know what’s working and what’s not working with your strategies. The information you gain through consumer insights provides you a stage to gauge all such matters from a distance. Analyze the change in their perceptions throughout your journey. Also, measure the specific changes when you introduce a new launch, promotional discount, offer, or sale on your products or services.

What are the Ways to Gather Consumer Insights on Social Media?

Every business knows who its consumers are. But in order to have more than a vague idea about them, you need to dive into the sea of consumer insights. Here are the ways you can gather consumer insights on social media:

Conduct a Primary Audience Analysis

The first logical step is to analyze your social media audience. Start with analyzing them by monitoring your own brand’s analytics. Study your brand mentions. Analyze the profiles that are mentioning your brands. These users are interested in you (negatively or positively), your content, and your brand. Segment their information in different groups like:

Age-group;
Gender groups;
On the basis of geographical locations;
Language-groups;
People who like your brand;
People who hate your brand, and more.

Sooner or later, these groups will help you find unexpected insights. Enrich your customer experience and communication with customers accordingly.

Research the Content Associated With Your Brand

When you think of a particular brand, a particular context comes to your mind. For example, Nike comes in relation to sportswear or sports fashion. Similarly, Netflix has its primary conversation going around movies, web shows, or documentaries.

However, you may not always know the full context of your brand. You need to find out the topics around which your brand name is brought up. Not to mention, more than half of the topic will be the expected ones. But there can be a few that are remotely related to your brand or not related at all.

For example, more than 4,000 people have brought up Nike when discussing Asia Pacific politics.

Notably, unexpected insights can help you reach a new segment of the audience.

Engage in a Social Listening Tool

Social media is a huge platform. You can’t manually analyze all the metrics and insights of just one platform, let alone multiple. Therefore, invest in a good social listening tool.

Social listening tools track the conversations happening around the brand. In addition, it monitors the social media mentions of your brand. Instead of manual labor, let the advanced social listening tools handle your data collection process. They keep a constant tab on trends, competitor’s actions, and other insights.

One of the best social media listening tools is Mentionlytics. It’s an all-in-one social media analytics tool that strengthens your online presence and brand image. It lets you access every bit of conversation happening around you on the web and social media. As a result, it’ll help you increase your brand’s revenue. It’ll also create a strong social media presence of your brand at the same time.

Start your free trial here!

Keep Tracking Your Competitors

Analyzing your brand is the perfect way to start developing consumer insights. However, that’s not all that’s required. You should also shift your focus from yourself to your competitor’s brand.

Start with listing all the major players in your industry. At the same time, conduct an analysis for them as well. This practice will help you unlock the secrets of your competitor’s success. First, find out what they are doing right. Compare their analytics with your brand and find your shortcomings. Study their positives closely. Do they have a section of the audience that you haven’t tapped into yet? Or how do their customers perceive them from an external perspective? Track all such details and analyze them.

Secondly, find out what they are doing that’s not working for them. Researching negatives is as important as researching the positives of a brand. Even if they rank below you, study their analytics to know what not to do. Such details will help you stay on the right track.

To Sum Up

Social media is home to more than four billion social media users around the world. It surfaces as an ultimate source of information for consumer insights. Along with the abundance of information, it also facilitates real-time insights.

In conclusion, consumer insights on social media can elevate your brand by unlocking subtle information about it. Use these insights effectively to increase the efficiency of your marketing efforts.

We hope this post successfully taught you the meaning, importance, and usage of consumer insights.

For more such informative posts on the social media world, stay tuned with us!

Originally posted on Mentionlytics : https://www.mentionlytics.com/blog/consumer-insights-social-media-marketing