With consumer needs and preferences changing faster than ever before, traditional surveys and panels are no longer adequate to gauge their buying behavior accurately. Not only are they complex and time-consuming, but they also fail to adequately capture customer sentiment across age groups, genders, languages, income brackets, and regions. Also, with the pandemic completely transforming how and where products are purchased, there is a pressing need for organizations to move away from manual surveys towards advanced data science-based consumer insights tools that paint a more accurate picture of consumers.
Why traditional surveys are no longer adequate
For a long time, brands have relied on traditional surveys and panels to understand the market sentiment, price sensitivity, preferred channel and payment modes, etc., among their audiences. Although these delivered a fair view of customers and their needs, in today’s digital era, they are soon becoming inadequate to gauge consumer behavior in detail:
- Traditional surveys are unable to list down factors that drive purchasing decisions.
- While they can capture customer needs, they aren’t efficient at capturing consumer outlook towards the product in question.
- Segmenting customers based on their geography, demography, income bracket, interests, intent, and browsing patterns is also not readily achievable.
- Contextually understanding consumer responses is not so straightforward, impacting the rate of credible responses.
- Most traditional surveys are offered only in a single language, with little or no multilingual support – making them insufficient to uncover customer sentiments across regions.
- They are incapable of re-using campaign audiences to gauge the effectiveness of the surveys and impact the quality and success of audience attribution.
The era of smart digital consumer insights tools is here.
In the age of digital consumers, organizations need a lot more than traditional surveys and panels to understand customers well. Customer insight tools provide organizations with all the information they need about their customers: who they are, where they are located, and what they expect from the business – so they can make better decisions about what, how, and when to sell to them.
- Generate detailed customer personas: With advanced data science capabilities built-in, consumer insight tools can tie survey responses back to individual users. This ability allows organizations to generate detailed customer personas and better understand current and prospective customers – across likes, habits, demographic info, preferred payment methods, and more.
- Run studies across different languages: Given how regions and cultural influences impact consumer decision-making, modern tools enable organizations to run studies across different regions and languages. Such capability helps in increasing the reach, representation, and authenticity of responses while also helping create credible respondent profiles.
- Create highly relevant target groups: Leveraging modern data science and programmatic advertising innovations, these tools help create highly relevant target or test groups, enabling businesses to reach out to the right users at the right time. This also helps efficiently segment marketing campaigns across different groups, send personalized, targeted content to each persona, and programmatically deliver interactive ads to generate credible responses.
- Gauge customer sentiment and sensitivity: Modern consumer insights tools can not only help take the pulse of the market and consumers around different industries; they can also help in gauging customer sentiments, price sensitivity, preferred channels, as well as key motivators (and barriers).
- Identify customers with unique behavior: In addition to uncovering insights about customer needs, wants, and preferences, these tools are also designed to identify a micro cohort of users with unique behavior, so they can be probed using specially designed interactive creatives.
- Create accurate geo-fences: Consumer insight tools offer the ability to adopt geo-fences, making it easy for market research organizations to understand how consumers behave in a real-world shopping environment. They also help throw light on how or where audiences who have already visited the website or have purchased a product can be retargeted.
Modern consumer insight tools bring several advanced capabilities that enable organizations to increase the reach, representation, and credibility of responses. What’s more, they can also help uncover answers to questions that would have otherwise been difficult to get answered – due to the sheer nature of the questions or the elusive cohorts that may be difficult to find. Aroscop’s consumer insight tool Ask1 recently predicted an unprecedented rise in shopping during the forthcoming festival season. Download the report today to learn more!
