Building Competitive Advantage: How Using Customer Insight Helps

Too often, business owners need to be reminded that getting new customers shouldn’t be the only goal that they focus on. As a business owner, you should also be delegating your efforts and resources toward retaining current customers; and nurturing the relationship that you’ve already built with them. Obviously, customers are one of the biggest assets that any organization has, therefore they should never be overlooked. Rather, gaining insight from them is a valuable technique that many businesses are using to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.

Since retailers today have progressed to be built around customers instead of products, driving the customer experience is paramount to survive through the difficult times; and remain relevant in highly competitive environments. So, why are consumer insights so valuable? Because, collecting and analyzing consumer insights can help determine why an individual consumer, or some other group chooses your brand over another.

Consumer Insights and Marketing Strategies

For organizations to build an effective marketing strategy today, the collection and interpretation of consumer insights is required. Studying consumer insights accomplishes everything from opening the door to personalized marketing campaigns, to solving issues that your customers might be experiencing with your product. For instance, utilizing social media channels is a powerful tool for targeting specific consumer bases with new products or services.

Insights = Knowledge=Strategy=Profits

Organizations continue to use customer insights to build a base of knowledge that can be used to develop a strategy. Here are some techniques that businesses are using to collect consumer insights:

• Creating teams to create insight and perform analysis
• Formulating insight distribution plans
• Establishing customer profiles and relevant data
• Educating employees on how to interpret customer insight

Once the insights are interpreted, the knowledge that is gained can also be used to enable closer customer relationships and anticipate their needs, rendering this data indispensable to any organization. The data can then be infused into an effective customer-based strategy to drive-up profits.

Foremost, it’s all about knowing the what, when and how to offer a customer your services or products. Learning about customers’ preferences via insights will enable you to customize your product or service accordingly. This is typically accomplished by establishing a customer-based strategy that promotes proactive relationships. Businesses that leverage customer data; such as purchase history, product preferences and contact information will always hold a significant edge over their competition.

Contact BrainWorks today to see how we can provide talent management consulting, plus executive and professional recruitment solutions to bring the best consumer insights talent to your organization.