How Customer Insights Can Drive Marketing

Digital marketing shouldn’t be a “guessing game” — that’s where customer insights come into play. 

Understanding digital marketing means understanding customer insights. In our technology-driven world, customer insights in marketing have a lot to do with collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the right data.  

In this article, we’ll define customer insights, how to gather relevant ones, and how any professional can boost marketing efforts through customer insights.

What are Customer Insights?

CoSchedule defines a customer insight (also known as consumer insight) as “an observation on the behavioral patterns of your target customers that can be used to make strategic adjustments to better suit their needs.” 

Customer insights are the result of marketers using data analysis and interpretation to understand an audience or customer base better. A relevant customer insight has 3 aspects to it:

• It allows you to recognize what the customer is doing
• It allows you to discover why the customer is doing what they’re doing
• Then, you come up with a solution (and ask why somebody hasn’t thought of this before)

These three steps to customer insights, if done correctly, should keep the customer happy and allow a business to keep making a product they want to purchase.  

How to Gain Relevant Customer Insights

Gaining relevant customer insights is no easy task. Digital marketers need to have the following in order to use customer insights effectively: 

High-Quality Data

Data can be collected from anywhere and everywhere, but it’s identifying and using the right data that drives business decisions. Digital marketers can collect high-quality data from a business’ personal website, social media channels, app or third-party data from other programs.    

Complete Analytics

Data is nothing if a professional isn’t able to analyze and interpret it properly. Trained professionals who know how to do this are in-demand in every industry and will continue to be in demand in the future. The use of the right analytics tools helps with completing analytics.   

Customer Segments

An entire business’ customer base is never going to be all the same. This is why digital marketing includes dividing a customer base into customer segments. This allows you to target different groups of customers who are in different stages of the buyer journey, and ultimately convert more potential buyers into customers.     

How to Boost Marketing Efforts Using Customer Insights

Digital marketers use customer insights every day to drive marketing efforts. These are the specific ways in which customer insights help drive marketing decisions: 

Know your competitors

The more digital marketers know their competitors, the better they can position their product. This is not an opportunity to copy competitors, but to learn from their successes, failures, downfalls, etc.     

Get personal versus mass marketing

There’s a time for mass marketing, and there’s a time to get personal. Customer insights help digital marketers to do both at the right times. In e-commerce for example, it’s beneficial for marketing to target a specific audience because of the ever-increasing competition.    

Improve the customer journey

There’s always a way digital marketers can improve the customer experience. Customer insights allow digital marketers to fill in any gaps within the customer journey to best suit the customer. Improving the customer journey helps retain customers and builds a better brand for potential customers to notice.  

Further Your Digital Marketing Analytics Knowledge

Effective digital marketing begins with the right marketing and business education. 

Montclair State University’s online Masters in Digital Marketing Analytics program prepares digital marketing professionals, entrepreneurs, business professionals, and career-changers with relevant digital marketing and business analytic skills to elevate any industry. 

Our fully online MS in Digital Marketing Analytics program is designed for working professionals who need to keep working full-time while furthering their education. Here are some highlights of our program to keep in mind: 

• You can earn your Master’s degree in as little as 24 months.
• Intertwine digital marketing and business analytics courses to be fully prepared for a career in digital marketing or a related field. 
• You’re provided with a Student Success Coach who is there to support you throughout your entire master’s experience.
• The program is offered through the Feliciano School of Business, which is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International—the world’s largest accrediting organization for business schools. 

If you’re ready to take the next step in furthering your digital marketing analytics knowledge and skills, then visit our MS in Digital Marketing Analytics overview page today!