Why is Customer Insight important for Brand Management?

Can you imagine if a CFO or Head of Finance just made figures up as they went along?

That would surely lead to financial doom! No doubt, the finance team in your business sticks to clear logic and a system. 

​Brand Strategy is no different. 

CMOs and Marketing Managers are in charge of a significant financial asset - your brand - therefore a robust management process is needed.

As much as it would be great if marketers could confidently list 'telepathy' or 'mind-reading' high on their list of skills, it's important to understand that marketing is as much science as it is art - if not more so.

Customer Insight should be used as your marketing 'sat nav'. Generated and used correctly, it can deliver a consistent and enduring brand status not to mention significant financial reward for your business.

The most successful brands will always have a clear customer insight strategy.

You'll need clear customer based insights to ensure success, whether you are:

• planning to launch a new product or service

• looking to increase sales by improving the quality of your sales leads

• or you need to improve your customer journey and experience

Customer Insight comes in all shapes & sizes

In today's marketing landscape, you can gain significant (almost overwhelming) amounts of consumer insight from your digital marketing activity.

If set up and used correctly, your Google Analytics and social media data such as Facebook's insights tool can you give you really detailed, almost real time customer data to help you observe purchase patterns and ensure even more targeted marketing activity.  

You can monitor response rates to every email you send and customer behaviour as they move around you website - even making your next marketing move based on the last page they visited or the last button they clicked. ​ Secondly, there's the data you may have in-house through your internal CRM systems. This can be mined to help the marketing team plan customer retention strategies through predictive analytics. ​ If that seems like enough to keep you staring cross eyed at your computer screens until 2040, then don't forget, there's another really powerful approach to market research.

Consumer research in the form of qualitative (such as focus groups) or quantitative (large survey based data) studies can help you understand your customer in the most powerful way possible.

Before you embark on significant activity such as new product development or a new campaign strategy with a high investment attached, I’d really recommend we have a chat about how you can create a strong customer insight programme.  It’s almost like insurance - without it, you’re just keeping your fingers crossed and hoping nothing goes wrong.

Do you have a robust insight strategy in place?

 Sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start and which data to analyse first. ​ If you'd like some help sorting the wood from the trees to introduce a meaningful customer insight strategy to your organisation, please get in touch for a free, no-obligation discussion with Sarah.

Visit the Sarah Lambley Marketing website

Further Reading: 5 Effective Tips for Brand Positioning Our Digital Marketing Services

What does a Small Business Marketing Consultant do? ​

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