3 Things Your Boss Will Want To Know About Insights

To a degree, good marketing has always relied on insights. Understanding consumer demands and recognising the trends, gaps and opportunities in a marketplace will always be key to successful product development and placement, but in the past only bigger brands could afford to put the resources towards obtaining enough data to make informed decisions about these factors. For a long time market research was perceived at best as a luxury product reserved for the big boys, and at worst as a waste of resources that produced no real return.

However the wealth of data that is now available about consumer habits, needs and behaviours allow even smaller businesses to develop insight strategies to aid their marketing efforts. The value of a marketer who understands data and insights is inflating (I’m not complaining… 🙂 ), and it’s for a very good reason. However a large number of businesses are still in the dark about how or why they should be involved in this arena.

In my mind, the value of insight is summed up very well in this article by Stephanie Miller, however if you are trying to sell the concept to the boss or board, you are likely to get asked some very specific (and unsurprising) questions.
Answering them in a straightforward and honest way will be key to working up an appetite for insights in your business.

Is an insight strategy going to make me money?

For an insight strategy to be of value, you firstly need to be measuring things that really matter to your business. From there, you need the processes and skills to recognise the insights in data that translate into business-focused actions. These will be different for every business, and guided by the sector and nature of the organisation and audience. They will take some careful thinking, and may often not be the most obvious metrics.

But with these in place, not only can an insight strategy make you money by helping to recognise opportunities in the marketplace, it can help you save money on wasted or unprofitable marketing activity and unsuccessful routes to market, and help you grow and develop your business in different directions based on real intelligence.
Some examples of how brands have used insights to directly improve sales are outlined in this PDF report.
So the short answer is yes – ask the right questions, collect the right data, then do something useful with it, and your insight strategy will make you money.

How much is it going to cost us?

Nothing of any worth is truly free, right? Yep, that is correct. Just like social media as a marketing channel, insights are certainly not free. Granted, much of the data you may want can be accessed without spending any actual cash, but that really only gets you about a third of the way to an actionable insight.

The investment in time and in the people that are capable of actioning an insight program is not necessarily cheap, but the potential for savings in other areas of marketing and advertising should be a measurable and realistic justification.

The short answer: Don’t play down the costs – this is an investment for long term benefits. Play up the value for money, because it’s definitely there if you get the strategy and resources right.

Are the competition doing it?

Yes… on some level at least. They may not have a fully-fledged strategy in place, but if they’re listening to conversation on social channels, analysing the responses to their direct marketing, tracking the sources of enquiries and purchases, sending out customer feedback forms etc etc then they are starting to put the building blocks in place.

Even if they are collecting all this data (and possibly a whole lot more) there’s still the chance to leapfrog them by doing the same AND making use of that data.

The truth is, whether the competition are doing it or not shouldn’t affect your decision, but nevertheless it’s usually a question that gets asked from the top…

So, the short answer? Forget what the competition are doing. If they are investing in insights then so should you be, and if they aren’t then you still should be.

If, by this point, the fourth question from the top isn’t “how soon can we get started?” then you’re either banging your head against a brick wall or you need to provide further evidence (hopefully the latter). If you need more help, turn to one of the heavyweights – this report by Deloitte provides a detailed definition of customer insight, and should give you the tools you need to explain the opportunities and benefits succinctly and confidently.

And if you need further backup, feel free to give me a shout! And if you found this article useful, please click here to share it on Twitter.