4 Tips For Building Successful Insights Communities

To extract valuable information from your community, you’ll have to know how to select the valuable data from the “background noise”. Read our 4 tips on how you can use your consumer insights community to the fullest.

1. Build And Follow The Customer Journey

As the market develops and the customer-business relationship grows tighter and more delicate, a vast number of companies recognize the crucial importance of closely watching the customer’s journey. There’s nothing more enlightening in business marketing than understanding how someone progresses from not even knowing about your brand to becoming a loyal member of your brand community. Once you’ve observed that, you can safely and cost-effectively allocate resources on certain points of conversion to boost your engagement and conversion rate.

Of course, the primary objective of a consumer insights community is insights gathering. But, in order to do that you need to have your customers engaged in the first place. To take a single point in that process and analyze things from that perspective alone is simply not enough and it will almost certainly lead to false data.

Think throughout the journey: How did customers get here? What were they looking for? What are they looking for now? Answers to these questions provide the context of their experience with your brand. Successfully identifying the strategic points in that journey allows you to smartly play your resources. Master the understanding of the customer’s journey and you’ll massively increase the success rate of your business.

2. Build Your Insights Community Around Familiar Topics

Only 4% of dissatisfied customers file complaints. This means that for every dissatisfied person you do business with, there are 24 more who are just as unhappy that you don’t know about! The key to motivating people to come out with their negative feedback is to proactively ask. And, not only once but several times throughout the strategical journey that we’ve mentioned in our first tip. Getting customer feedback is much easier and effective if you seek an answer instead of waiting for it and you can ask in a couple of ways.

Surveys, although effective, just scratch the surface and have to be repeated frequently as customers’ insights are known to shift rapidly. What you need to do to master surveys is to perfect the questions you’re asking. Asking about how they would rate your product on a scale of 1 to 10 is good for a start, yes, but it can under no circumstances be left at that only.

The answer to this question is useful and a good starting point, but be sure to follow-up with a responsive question that digs deeper into their initial answer (i.e. their 1-10 rating, in this case). You can change up the format if you wish! You can follow a regular survey up with an in-person interview.

For example, you can randomly select a dozen customers and ask them some pre-crafted open-ended questions. Analyze the keywords they use and the sentiment with which their answers were given. Apply those very insights to your business methods effectively for maximum success.

Related Post: Get on Top of Your Consumer Insights: The tools you need to succeed

3. Design Your Insights Community To Be Continuous

Insights communities themselves are no longer a novelty in the field of business marketing. Global trends have already gone a step forward and you should keep the pace if you wish to stay ahead of your competition. In 2018, the strategies revolving around customer experience will need a higher level of cooperation and synchronization between various segments of your business.

Insights is not a fancy word for data you collect and keep as a trophy. You must use what you gather. Adopt a entire, interlinked brand experience. To give you an example, have your store managers keep their eyes on metrics related to local net promoter scores and staff professionalism.

CEOs should observe global net promoter scores and customer satisfaction, and so on. Customer needs require that to be done in near real-time! To monitor feedback and immediately react to it is the ideal customer experience to strive for. The benefits are huge – because customers love brands that go above their own standards to perfect their service.

Related Post: 3 Ways Communities Empower Brands to Become Awesome

4. Aim To Build Customer Relationships

The last tip isn’t directly bound to insights gathering but more to the community itself. Establish relationships with customers. Why? Because satisfied customers are your best salespeople. Not just because of word-of-mouth marketing. They usually become the best advocates of your brand in your community. Such customers maintain loyalty to your brand while further exposing others to it.

Spot such customers, employ gamification efforts, and create a faithful group of brand evangelists. Beloved brands are never unsuccessful brands.