Customer Insights: Does Your Brand Need a GPS?

In life, "if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there." This a quote from famed English author Lewis Carroll. What does it have to do with retailers, you ask? Well, the same holds true for retail marketing. That's why it's so important for you to tap into consumer insights to drive your digital marketing strategy.

In this article, I'll take a look at why consumer insights matter so much and how you can best use them to your advantage.

When it comes to online marketing, the retail industry is thought to be on the leading edge. And given the high level of competition in this market and the pressure to maintain profit margins, it's very easy to see why retail marketers must capitalize on every advantage possible in order to remain competitive. Fortunately, consumer insights can provide an advantage. In fact, they should be the foundation of every retailer's digital strategy.

Why? Taking the time to understand your customers and using those insights to drive your marketing campaigns will result in enormous benefits for your company. Leveraging consumer insights allows you to target the right audience before they even enter the purchase funnel.

You'll be able to prioritize which content and format is most critical to develop, which messaging is most effective at different points in the purchase funnel, and the specific mix of media that will drive the best overall performance. In turn, consumer insights can help ensure that your media dollars are spent as wisely as possible — i.e., they increase the likelihood of those consumers converting into customers.

Layering: The Key to Leveraging Consumer Insights
To take an audience-based approach to your marketing campaigns, it's important to research as much about your customers as possible. Search data provides marketers with the best understanding of consumer intent through what's essentially a large, real-time focus group. To best understand your audience though you should also layer in the data you have about your customers, your site's performance and other third-party data.

Pulling together these different data points will help you start to define a true online persona for your customers. The data should inform you about their interests, sites visited, mediums used, conversion activity, preferred messaging and much more. Ultimately, it will enable you to better define your target audience and, in turn, better reach them.