Top 7 Tools for Customer Insights

Creative briefs, content strategies, and RFPs are meant for serving ONE main purpose – gaining valuable insights into customer behavior.

Customer insights are essential to create content that will convert.

In the digital age, we have too much customer data at our disposal. And yet there are marketers who find it difficult to identify their audience. They don’t know who their customers are or what they want.

This leads to making broad assumptions that may or may not apply to their audience. Unfortunately, this does not help their case.

Most customers are now online and they leave a trail of data on social media sites and search engines. This data provides valuable customer insights that brands should be analyzing.

Customer centric marketers use all kinds of tools to get a better understanding of their customers. Since plenty of online tools are readily available, even for small teams, there is no excuse for not digging deeper.

Analytics can be daunting if you’re not used to delving into data but don’t let that deter you.

Once you know what information you need, you’ll be able to paint an accurate picture of your customers and their preferences; allowing you to accurately define your customer personas.

We’ve picked out the top 7 customer-centric marketing tools to help you to better understand your customers.

1. YouTube Analytics

You may have posted a lot of videos on YouTube, but do you know who is watching them? Is it possible that your audience is totally different to what you expected?

YouTube users post an incredible 300 hours of video to YouTube every single minute (Source: unmetric.com) and its analytics can provide an amazing amount of customer insight.

How to define your audience on YouTube

To find out who your real audience is, click on the ‘demographics tab’, here you’ll find information about the location and age of the people who watch your videos. Once you know who your audience is, you will be able to produce more personalized content that caters to their needs and increases conversions.

The Retention Rate shows the average watch time for the video. It is important because Google uses the retention rate to assess whether viewers find your content interesting or not. If your retention rate is high, your search rankings will also be high. If the average retention rate is low (under 25%), you should consider reducing the length of your videos.

Attract more visitors to your site using YouTube Analytics

Did you know that by using YouTube Analytics, you can attract more visitors to your site? By taking a look at the analytics for each video, you can find out where your viewers engage with your content and when they leave. Once you find out when viewers typically leave your videos, you can add a call to visit your site about ten seconds before that point.

2. Use Google's Audience Retention Tool to Track Viewer Engagement

Google Surveys is another great tool for developing a clear understanding of who your customers are by conducting custom surveys to target specific audiences.

You can specify which data you want to collect from age, geography, gender, family structure to income in order to ensure that it’s relevant to your content and audience.

These focus groups are readily available. You get numerous results within a few days instead of a couple of results in weeks and they will be useful when you are writing your brief. And they don’t cost much with pricing beginning at 10 cents per response.

Ask a question and Google will put that question out to the relevant audience.

3. Try Google Trends for Gaining in-Depth Consumer Insights

Using Google Trends, you can confirm your assumptions about the interests of your audience.

If you are still trying to figure out which topics your audience might like, Google Trends can help.

Consider this example.

You are a beauty brand and you want to stay on top of the next trends in makeup videos. Using Google Trends, your marketing team can find out which beauty trends are currently rising and falling.

Currently, videos that show ‘how to contour foundation are hot whereas ‘Eye makeup for party’ has become much less popular. Compare how these search terms perform over the years on Google Trends. Google Trends shows the most popular topics in your niche. When you know what they are interested in, you can create content that satisfies their need. For example, if people are interested in contouring, you can post several contouring videos on YouTube.

Can’t decide what each video should be about?

Google Trends can help here as well. Use the ‘related searches’ option to find out the rising searches and top searches. This information will help you find out what contouring fans are looking for.

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics software. It tracks the traffic to your website along with the performance of various web pages.

Using Google Analytics you can also find out where your visitors are coming from, how much time they spend on the site, and their geographic distribution.

One of the best features of Google Analytics is their Goal Funnel

Goal Funnel is particularly important for marketers and retail sites. Set up a list of URLs that the customer clicks through when they complete a purchase. This feature allows you to find out how many customers are going through the purchase process.

You will also be able to find out how many of them abandon the purchase at a certain stage. Using this information, you can adjust your strategies and make the buying experience easier.

Google will also show the keywords that people use to find your site.

Analyze their behavior on your site to find out which pages are attracting the most visitors and where they are coming from.

5. Social Mention

This is a free tool that provides a real-time analysis of social media. It organizes social media mentions of your brand into a single stream and includes hashtags, top keywords, and sites.

Social Mention is a hit with social media enthusiasts. More than 100 social networks are monitored by this tool. It is a great free listening tool available for marketers.

It gives an in-depth analysis of data and measures influence in four categories: sentiment, strength, passion, and reach.

6. Facebook Audience Insights

Audience Insights are different than Page Insights and report customer demographics by gender, age, relationship status, lifestyle, and job role. In addition, this tool reports the number of likes, purchase activity, and Facebook usage.

Here is how to use Audience Insights:

1. Access the tool

Go to Ads Manager and click on Tools. You will find it at the top right. From the dropdown list, select Audience Insights. Or use the following URL to access Audience Insights directly: www.facebook.com/ads/audience_insights.

2. Select the Audience

Choose the audience whose data you want to analyze.

• Everyone on Facebook
• People connected to your page
• A Custom Audience

If your website has a huge fan base or a custom audience, analyze them first.

If you can’t decide the right audience, choose the option ‘Everyone on Facebook’. This option gives more insights.

7. Klout

This is a great tool for exploring, identifying, and categorizing influencers. Using Klout, you can search for influencers in your niche. It uses Twitter engagement to measure influence.

How Klout works

Klout mainly uses Facebook, Twitter and more than 35 different variables to measure your social media influence and reach.

Your score is grouped into 3 different metrics – Network Influence, True Reach and Amplification Probability.

In spite of its huge popularity, Klout is a controversial monitoring tool. A lot of marketers hate it and claim that the scoring system used by Klout is inaccurate. And then there are a lot of people who find it useful because it determines influence by analyzing engagement on Twitter. It allows you to find out what your audience thinks about your brand.

Since the Klout score is a reflection of your influence, you can use it to increase your engagement rates by making changes to your posts.

In a Nutshell

Market research can be pretty expensive, but you can save a lot if you conduct your own study. With the right research, you’ll get an opportunity to get an insight into your target customers’ habits and buying behavior. Just try any of the tools given above and you’ll be able to understand your customers in a better way.

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