Many businesses face headwinds as economic uncertainty remains and consumer sentiment continues to decline. Whether you’re succeeding or struggling at this time, remain confident in the knowledge that customer and market insight will reveal opportunities to win.

In this blog post, as featured in the recent Virtual NonExecs newsletter, we cover the ways that you can deepen your understanding of the customer and market and unlock actionable insight that boosts your business results.

When you combine meaningful business, customer and market insight with the experience and expertise you’ve built over the years, your boardroom advice is delivered from a position of strength. Taking meaningful insight to the boardroom, empowers you as an individual and when activated, organisations reap the rewards.

Across Marketing, Finance, Customer Service, IT, Operations and more, it has never been more important to lead with insight than now.

At Hexdon, we help Marketing leaders and counterparts to deliver commercial value by identifying the insight and acting on it. We go beyond data, facts and knowledge. To us, insight comes with context, it solves common challenges, it fuels decision making and injected with a little creativity, it inspires team members to take action.

How To Unlock Customer & Market Insight

1. Customer & Market Surveys

Surveys capture the voice of the customer at scale and their insight highlights customer attitudes, behaviours and needs with the goal to optimise a range of business levers: product, price, market orientation, competitor dynamics, marketing effectiveness and more.

Your customer database and nationally representative market panels are ideal survey audiences that provide a clear view of the business world. Surveys are cost effective, quick to deploy and are the catalyst for actionable insight that you can take to the boardroom in days.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups enable deep conversations with your customers. This impactful approach allows you to hear first hand, the truth about your brand, product, customer experiences, attitudes, behaviours and more. Ask questions, observe and derive meaningful insight that fuels business decision making.

Split your focus groups by promoters and detractors. Promoters love your brand, while detractors have negative perspectives. The gold comes from going deep with each group to identify and act on the drivers and barriers to buying from you.

3. Social Listening

Monitor your brand’s social media channels and listen out for customer feedback and mentions. Real time insight comes from contextual conversations that highlight what they think and feel about you and your competitors brands and products. Importantly, you’ll capture challenges, pain points and opportunities to improve.

Social Insight platforms are enablers, especially those that help you to streamline the process that takes you from unstructured data to meaningful insight, to social commerce at speed.

4. Internal Business Systems

Many organisations have untapped data sources right under their noses. Whether it’s finance, customer or product systems, they are ripe for analysis that uncover meaningful actionable insight.

Let’s take your customer database as an example. Campaign targeting by RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) provides key insight into their engagement. Insight from churn analysis helps identify high value customers at risk of disengaging. CLV modelling (Customer Lifetime Value) insight helps to acquire and retain more customers, improve experience and increase commercial results.

5. 360 Degree Insights Framework

Organisations that recognise the power of insight, measure KPI’s to track the impact of taking action. They seek 360 degree insight and apply the approaches above to satisfy customer needs, innovate fastest in the market and address macro trading conditions to beat the competition.

Your opportunity is to take this best practice insight framework to the board and unlock the wisdom that inspires meaningful change.

Insight To Action

Turning data into insight has zero value, but when insight is turned into action, the business moves towards commercial opportunity. Let’s take a look at the most impactful opportunities for businesses today:

6. Know Your Customer

Organisations recognise the need to nurture their customers to be high value and engaged for the long term, but many fail to unlock the customer insight that informs their attitudes, behaviours, needs and the drivers and barriers to shopping with you.

When organisations identify and take action on this insight, they nurture the customer relationship across segments. They invest in the value exchange and balance short and long term business activities for commercial gain. In turn, customers value the experience, recommend the brand, and spend more with you.

7. Product & Price

Whether it’s a physical object, a service or something else, the key to success lies in the customers’ perspective.

What are the top features and benefits of your product? What are the customers’ emotional and rational needs? What problem does your product solve? How do you improve the drivers of purchasing across touchpoints? Opportunities lie in the insight behind these questions.

Don’t let your organisation assume knowledge. They are not their customers; markets change. Instead, enable the marketing team to seek the insight into product & price, mitigate risk of failure and unlock innovations in brand and product line extensions, co-branding and more.

8. Market Orientation

The market is changing fast and so are your competitors. Look outwards and arm the board with market and competitor insight that allows your organisation to differentiate itself, play to its strengths and grow market share.

Aim intentionally for specific market segments that play to your strengths. Understand how your brand and product is seen against competitors by understanding Awareness, Consideration, Purchase Intent metrics. Then take action to increase conversion.

With your finger on the market pulse and armed with insight, you’ll be set up to defend revenue and seek new strategic opportunities for commercial gain.

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