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1. The Importance of Consumer Insights
2. The Value of Consumer Data
3. How to Become a Customer-Centric Company
4. Measuring the Success of Your Consumer Insights Program
5. Challenges in Integrating Consumer Insights Programs

6 min read

According to 45% of marketers, executives pay close attention when decisions are based on consumer insights. For this reason, becoming the authoritative voice of the customer should be a priority for marketing specialists.

More and more companies are regularly investing in resources to obtain consumer data — 83% according to Zinklar. The reasons? Increased confidence in decision-making, risk minimization, ROI optimization, and improved day-to-day operations.

To be a customer-centric company, data must become the driving force behind business decisions. Integrating a consumer insights program into the company can be quite a challenge, but the return on doing so is a success whose results will impact the entire organization.

The Importance of Consumer Insights

The primary goal of any company is to meet the needs of its consumer. To achieve this, it’s essential to understand their preferences and priorities when purchasing products. However, today there is such an abundance of information that marketing professionals have difficulty obtaining the data that is truly relevant to their business strategy.

In this context, market research emerges as the best solution to obtain relevant real-time insights that help brands identify opportunities and solve problems, evaluate results, and iterate agilely with the target audience. This way, it is possible to adjust strategies to market demands.

The Value of Consumer Data

The fact that 83% of companies regularly invest in resources to obtain consumer insights reflects a trend among brands to adopt a customer-centric approach. Doing so allows them to:

• Minimize risks in decision-making
• Optimize ROI
• Personalize strategies
• Enhance innovation
• Foster customer loyalty
• Anticipate trends
• Differentiate from the competition
• Achieve continuous improvement

How to Become a Customer-Centric Company

The role of marketing directors in adopting a customer-centric approach to achieve business objectives is fundamental. This strategy allows brands to improve the customer experience before, during, and after the purchase process. To do so, marketers must:

• Highlight the importance of the customer-centric approach to the executive board. It is essential that decision-making recognizes the relevance of putting the consumer’s voice at the corporate center to understand their preferences and create strategies and products that adapt to them.
• Design a process that allows you to implement the new model and share it with different teams in the company. It is necessary to clearly define the buyer persona and their pain points to understand what they are looking for and how you can offer the best solution. Consumer data is the most relevant source of information to make informed decisions.
• Understand the buyer journey of your target to meet their needs during the purchase process. You must consider the different interaction points of your audience with your brand.
• Adopt the necessary tools to obtain consumer insights regularly and in real-time; only then will you be able to continuously adapt your actions to align with market and target audience changes. This way, you can maximize the ROI of your marketing strategy.
• Scale your discoveries and ensure the entire company is aware of the insights you gain to understand the customer and focus all efforts on meeting their needs.

Measuring the Success of Your Consumer Insights Program

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a simple question to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, such as “How likely are you to recommend the product/brand to a friend?” Brand promoters are those who rate it 9 or 10; passives are consumers who are satisfied but might switch to another brand if offered a better deal; and detractors are those with a score between 0 and 6, as they are not happy and their opinion could affect the brand’s reputation.
• Customer Retention: Acquiring new customers is more costly than retaining existing ones, so companies invest more resources in fostering loyalty and retaining customers for as long as possible.
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This is used to measure customer satisfaction after a specific interaction or experience. According to Zendesk data, 80% of customers would switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience with a brand.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): This refers to the profit a customer brings to the business over their relationship.

Challenges in Integrating Consumer Insights Programs

Limited data access is the main problem when integrating consumer insights into decision-making for 39% of marketers. This is closely followed by the difficulty in measuring ROI, lack of time and budget, and resistance from stakeholders.

To overcome these obstacles, it is important to demonstrate how market research will improve and optimize activities that directly impact the business. Achieving this will avoid:

• Communication gaps between departments.
• Isolated teams with a lack of alignment in terms of objectives and data
• Disengaged staff

Integrating consumer insights into decision-making is essential to achieving business objectives. To do so, marketing professionals need to align consumer data with executive expectations. Becoming the authoritative voice of the customer will allow you to reduce the risk of your actions and optimize your return on investment.