Consumer Insights and Competition: Keys to Develop a Winning Strategy
Making a profit requires market research and consumer insights to make sure your business thrives in the long run. Getting your customer’s perspective is crucial to developing strategies that can combat the threats of competition and market trends.
The product, symbol, and experience are three pillars of a successful brand. If all three works together perfectly, then you’ve gained a huge step towards success. Building a brand relies on various data that will pull out essential information that will help keep you right on track.
A company’s branding elements should be designed to create a unique, memorable, and positive impression. And to fully grasp your target market, you need to know what your market thinks of you and what they want from your brand.
What is Consumer Insights?
The role of uncovering consumer insights is significant and can help you build data-driven strategies. Insights, however, can have complex information. It can include random data, human emotions, negative perception, or online numbers that you may find to be unimportant.
However, you will use these insights to generate a foundation on which you build the rest of your ideas. While they may seem random to you at first, doing a deep dive on consumer insights and competitor research will help you formulate laser-focused and effective strategies.
Marketers value brand and consumer insights, and when they find something that works, they stick to it and capitalize on the results.
But today, the consumer environment and competition are rapidly changing. What worked now may not work in the next few weeks. And with the rise of innovative entrepreneurs, the number of threats appears to be infinite.
So the question is: How would meet your consumer demands and continue to be relevant?
Want to Talk to us About Consumer Insights?
How to Get Powerful Brand Insights?
Powerful insights are those that can uncover truths about the brand, the brand identity, and the perception of the target consumers about it.
The basic 4Ps are still relevant to marketers: product, place, price, promotion. Brand strategists would need a great amount of data to collect and analyze, it includes business context, culture, technology, marketing, trends, and more.
Getting brand insights that truly matter is no easy task, but while this is a great challenge, a greater opportunity comes along with it.
Hire a brand strategist
Business owners or top-level executives make the mistake of defining their brands with who they are in their minds—a personal take so to speak. This creates a misleading force that will influence all aspects of branding including the right strategy that will work.
Problem is, instead of digging up real brand insights, they go into the creation of plans using made-up information. And in doing so, they fall short on the brand story that they should have—one that is created with real data.
So the best way to avoid this is to get an outsider and a professional with unbiased views. Hire someone who can create brand stories from clean and reliable data. This way, you can get valuable information from someone who does it best and will help you iron out what needs to be done first.
Discover what makes your brand special
Analyze the origins of your brand, your history, the characteristics of your products and services, your consumers, and their aspirations. These types of information will help you craft your story—a story that will capture new customers and will retain loyal ones.
A brand story creates a structure of what really matters about a brand. It articulates not only the surface but also the core elements of how a brand is created which can help businesses realize their potential to move forward.
Analyze what customers think about you
The best way to know what your customers think about you is to ask them directly. You can do this by using surveys, direct messages, emails, and reviews. Additionally, social listening is another way to know what the public is saying about you.
If you have a website, go into your traffic analytics dashboard and you will discover who your customers are, what content they like, which products get the most clicks, and so on.
Your interaction with your market matters a lot in getting actual information that you can use to create better branding strategies.
However, it’s not all the time that your customers will tell you the truth. And that’s why building relationships is another form of strategy that will help you solidify a customer base that lasts.
Use multiple data sources
Dealing with big data can be tricky. Great insights will be all over the place at first so in order for you to follow a firm train of thought, you can slice down your data sources and look for actionable information.
To be able to understand your consumers, you need to dig deeper into each layer that you can find. Data can be in numbers and these numbers need smart interpretation. For instance, you have 100,000 monthly website visitors, but only 20% stay for more than 2 minutes. What does this data tell you?
3 Key Competitor Insights to Uncover
In the vast sea of competitors, getting a new perspective will help you discover things that you’ve never thought would be beneficial for your business. Having established competition is definitely a challenge, however, their footprints will extremely help in building effective business plans and strategies.
Start off with your direct competitors followed by indirect competitors. Invest in the right tools that are available to help you achieve your goals. These are key to help you learn and analyze your competitors in a bird’s eye view.
Website Metrics
A website is a powerful branding tool for any business. It can be used to establish credibility, to interact with customers, and to promote and increase your business sales. And most, if not all, established business has invested in a website too.
There is no denying that digital transformation has happened and it comes along with powerful metrics that you can unearth using the right tools.
These tools are just some of the tools you can use, there are more tools you can use to analyze your competitors and build an edge that can rival them.
Target Market
Who is the target market of your competitors? Most importantly, which ones do they hit?
To find this, check their traffic and social media analytics. Then look at the audience overlap between you and your competitors. Compare the segments, the positioning, and the marketing initiatives all of you do and reveal audience preferences.
Communication
Traffic metrics all are numbers and they can only reveal certain information about your competition. So another factor to check is how they communicate with their audience.
Good customer service is a major factor when people decide to buy a product and stay loyal. If customers are not satisfied in these areas, acquisition and retention results will suffer.
Check how they handle criticisms, check the way they respond to grunt customers, and check where they are accessible in terms of user engagement. And then create a better version for your brand.
These complex findings will give you a headstart on what areas you need to avoid and what are steps you need to develop.
Beating the Competition with Better Branding Strategy
A branding strategy involves more than just creating digital footprints and putting yourself wherever you can. Your branding strategy is all about making sure your brand is the first thing people think of instead of your competitors.
So how do you beat your competition?
Be flexible
Launching a revolutionary or unique product doesn’t automatically translate to being popular.
Study your customer’s buying habits and try to tailor your offers to match. It will take some time for your branding strategy to really take off, so be patient and keep marketing your products or services until you start seeing results.
Establish Digital Branding
Today, branding your business includes making it available on the internet. Traditional marketing strategies are transitioning to digital, and your competitors are there too.
The first thing is to create an attractive website and social media pages. Create your digital footprint as there is a projection of over 230 million US online customers in the year 2021. This data says a lot about the next trends that will happen, most buyers are switching online. And a lot of them look for reviews first before finally deciding to buy.
Look for competitor gaps
Do not be afraid to engage with your competitors, even the big ones.
Look for their weaknesses and investigate the gaps you can exploit. What market segments are they missing? What do customers hate about them? Once you identify these gaps, you can then create a game plan that will suit you and your market best.
One example is how Uber revolutionized the transportation system by looking at the global trends of the internet and mobile phones. They knew what’s missing, capitalized on it, and became a market leader.
If consumer insights and competitive analysis are something your business needs to improve on, then you can always come talk to us. We’ll help you manage your strategy and create better decisions for your brand that will last.
