“There’s an insight for that.” “Don’t miss these essential insights.” “Are you getting the insights your business needs?” But what is the real definition of a Market Insight.
If you were alive in the year 2017, it’s likely you heard the word “insight” too many times to count — in fact, it’s become many innovation market testers’ favorite word. But what exactly does it mean?
It seems that the more it’s used, the more vague its definition becomes. Here, we’ll give you the most accurate definition of a market insight, what it isn’t, how they’re best utilized and how you can get the best insights for your innovation.
Insight is a crucial component of effective marketing. At its core an insight refers to a deep understanding of customer motivations, needs desires, and behaviors. Leveraging the right insights can help marketers create more relevant, impactful campaigns that truly resonate with target audiences.
In today’s crowded marketplace, gaining actionable insights is more important than ever for brands looking to set themselves apart. Read on to learn more about what marketing insights are, why they matter, and how to uncover impactful insights for your brand
What is Insight in Marketing?
A marketing insight is a non-obvious truth or finding that reveals something meaningful about consumer psychology and behavior. Insights go beyond surface-level demographics and help explain the “why” behind consumer actions.
Some key characteristics of an effective marketing insight include
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Revelatory – Provides a fresh, unexpected perspective on the consumer.
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Actionable – Points to clear opportunities for the brand or guides strategic direction.
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Substantiated – Supported by credible research and data points.
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Inspiring – Sparks creative ideas for meeting unmet consumer needs.
Simply having data or information about consumers does not constitute an insight. True insights identify less obvious connections, tap into fundamental human motivations, or challenge assumptions about the target audience.
Here are a few examples of powerful consumer insights:
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Young men see fitness as a way to signal masculinity and strength rather than pursuing health benefits. This reveals an emotional motivation behind gym routines.
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Busy moms feel constant tension between work and home responsibilities. This insight highlights the dual roles moms play and pressure they feel.
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Teens see social media likes as validation of their popularity. This uncovers the deeper social anxiety and desire for approval underlying social media use.
These compelling insights can inform product innovations, branding, campaigns, and experiences that truly speak to the consumer.
Sources for Developing Consumer Insights
How does one uncover these non-obvious but impactful consumer insights? There are a few key sources marketers can tap into:
Consumer Research
Dedicated qualitative and quantitative research focused on understanding consumer psychology, emotions, and motivations. This can include focus groups, ethnography, surveys, and more.
Market Trends
Identifying shifts in the market through trends analysis and benchmarking against competitors. Trend tracking can reveal unmet needs.
Business Data
Analytics on sales data, web traffic, social engagement and other metrics can uncover usage patterns, pain points, and behaviors.
Customer Feedback
Direct feedback from customers via interviews, reviews, support tickets, and conversations can provide honest, first-hand insights.
Subject Matter Experts
Tapping the knowledge of internal teams like sales, customer support, and market researchers who interact closely with customers.
The most impactful insights often arise from combining multiple sources of consumer data and perspectives. A research survey, for example, will be much more insightful when paired with ethnographic customer interviews. Mixing quantitative and qualitative data provides a powerful 360-degree view.
Why Marketing Insights are Vital for Brand Success
Truly customer-focused marketing depends on actionable insights. Here are just some of the key reasons insight matters:
Inspires Innovation
Insights directly inform product and service innovations that meet customer needs in new ways. For example, insight into teens’ desire for parental independence inspired Uber’s teen accounts.
Drives Strategy
Insights ensure strategy is grounded in real consumer motivations vs. assumptions. The right insights guide decisions on positioning, branding, segments to target, and more.
Sparks Creativity
Insights breathe life into creative work by supplying the human truth that makes campaigns relatable. Burger King’s “Whopper Detour” campaign used the insight that McDonald’s loyalty program offered no real value to spark creative ideas.
Creates Connection
Leveraging poignant insights forges an emotional connection with customers by showing the brand profoundly understands their lives.
Fuels Content
Content built on insights better engages audiences by focusing on what’s truly valuable and relevant to them. ContentCal leveraged insights around content team friction to guide its positioning.
Beats Competition
Competing brands have access to much of the same data. Proprietary insights uncovered through research provide an edge.
Drives ROI
Campaigns based on human insights simply perform better by driving relevance, engagement, word of mouth, and sales.
How to Uncover Impactful Consumer Insights
Developing razor-sharp insights takes work. Here is a step-by-step approach:
Frame the Key Questions
Start by framing the key questions that will guide your research. What do you need to uncover about motivations, pain points, behaviors, etc.? Avoid assumptions.
Gather Multiple Data Sources
Collect quantitative and qualitative consumer data through surveys, interviews, focus groups, reviews, third-party research, internal sources, etc.
Immerse Yourself in the Data
Thoroughly analyze the data to spot connections, patterns, contradictions, and buried leads. An insight rarely comes from a single data point.
Look Broadly for Unmet Needs
Step back and look for unmet consumer needs hinted at through frustrations, behaviors, requests, market patterns etc. These often reveal opportunity areas.
Connect Emotions and Motivations
Look beyond behaviors and connect the deeper emotional motivations driving consumers. Leverage psychology frameworks like Maslow’s hierarchy.
Tell a Story
Organize disparate data points into a compelling narrative about the consumer. Refine this until you have an “Aha!” moment.
Stress Test Insights
Pressure test candidate insights across different audiences, markets, and teams. Do they consistently illuminate something new and useful?
Prioritize Game Changing Insights
Identify the 1-3 insights with the biggest potential impact for your brand that merit significant investment and creative exploration.
Turning Insights into Action
The hardest part is translating your hard-won consumer insights into actions that influence strategy and marketing. Here are some tips:
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Socialize insights across the organization to drive buy-in and spark additional ideas.
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Research potential innovation opportunities suggested by the insights.
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Brainstorm how insights can inform branding, positioning, packaging, campaigns, content etc.
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Launch pilot campaigns to test ideas in market before committing significant budgets.
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Measure performance and pivot as needed. Be sure brand tracking captures whether campaigns are driving relevance.
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Invest heavily behind the most promising insight-driven ideas over the long term.
The Path to Customer Devotion Starts Here
In today’s experience-driven economy, leaner brands can outmaneuver larger players by leveraging superior customer insights. Investing in continuous insight mining pays dividends through better engagement, retention, word-of-mouth advocacy, and growth. Start putting the customer under the microscope today to uncover insights that inspire creative marketing ideas your competitors will envy.
Using the word “insight” in marketing
Good marketing practice includes being wary of how the word “insight” is used, being especially careful not to interchange it with raw data, quantitative research or general knowledge. Insightful marketing should always drive better understanding of current and future buyers in the market, enable informed decisions when choosing a specific growth option and identify market trends in innovation. If it doesn’t add value or incite specific action, it’s probably not a market insight.
First of all: What are market insights?
Simply put, a market insight is the discovery of a relevant, actionable and previously unrealized reality about a target market as the result of deep, subjective data analysis. The goal of insight in marketing — especially when marketing a previously unused or unknown innovation — is to benefit both parties, meeting your target audience’s true needs and wants while simultaneously profiting. In other words, the best market insights offer value for both the seller and the companies in need of the innovation.
Market insights are often confused or interchanged with data, knowledge or general feedback. While data has the potential to become an insight, data alone is simply numbers — only a real, breathing, thinking human can turn such knowledge into an insight.
What’s the difference between insights and feedback? While feedback is a hard fact (“my car is big”), insights are more perceptive, with a hint of subjective wisdom (“my car is big, which makes me feel safer on the road”). The goal of a market insight is to bring understanding and clarity through the conveyance of fresh perspectives.
Further, market insights shouldn’t be confused with consumer insights — market insights address not individuals, but professionals in a field directly impacted by innovation.
How To Find Consumer Insights In Marketing?
What is a marketing insight?
At its simplest, a marketing insight is a valuable, actionable piece of information that tells you something new about the world. It is often the jumping off point for your campaign.
Why are marketing insights important?
Understanding what customers want and need is crucial for creating successful marketing campaigns. Marketing insights provide valuable information based on data about the people a company wants to reach. They’re different from raw data because it’s not just numbers; it’s the useful conclusions marketers can draw from them.
What is a Marketing Insights report?
Automate Your Marketing Insights Reporting Today! Marketing insights are strategic or tactical learnings distilled from large amounts of data. Often, they’re used to inform marketing campaigns across the customer journey. What’s the difference between data and insights?
What are insights & why are they important?
Through insights. Keep reading to learn more about what insights are, why they’re important, and how to get them. What Is Insight? In business, insight is the combination of life/work experiences with systematically-collected and analyzing data. Data without added business context isn’t valuable because it doesn’t show you what you should do next.
