What You Should Expect To Discover By Surveying Consumers For Insights

One of the most critical marketing tools is the consumer insights survey. This is a questionnaire that tries to elicit answers about how consumers feel toward products, services, brands, and organizations.

If you're planning to work with a consumer insights firm to track some of these questions, you might wonder what you ought to expect. Here are 5 major items that often come from surveys of consumers.

Answers to Why Questions

Most organizations assemble some degree of data regarding consumer activities. If your company sells a phone app, for example, you probably already have data points for unique daily users, downloads, installs, subscriptions, uninstalls, and quits. Oftentimes, that data opens more questions than it answeres. If you're staring at several months of quits and uninstalls after years of positive growth, you probably want to know why folks are leaving.

Identification of Groups

People often form identifiable groups, but you'll have a hard time discerning them from basic datasets. To find out who's who, a survey can just ask. By surveying consumers, you'll quickly find out how they group in terms of age, economics, social leanings, and more. You can then start thinking about how to appeal to these different groups, especially if they seem to come from different walks of life.

Data about Other Organizations

It's not always easy to get data on other organizations. If you have a competitor, you can look for information in the public sphere. However, it's often simpler to just ask consumers what they think. A consumer insights survey can help you understand why certain products and brands hold up better than others.

Time-Based Changes

Studying consumer insights should be a constant effort. Folks who maintain that effort long enough will eventually develop time-based datasets. You can start to see trends and patterns in the surveys. For example, a company might see a decline in interest in a product over a 10-year span. You can also drill into other data, such as demographics, to see if the change is generational or something else.

Interaction Issues

Some elements of processes can be hard to deduce purely from data. Suppose a company is trying to figure out why so few people finish signing up for its newsletter. A consumer insights survey can inquire about potential interactive issues that might inhibit the process.

You might find, for example, the signup process triggers higher quit rates because people have to check their emails and younger users don't tend to use email much. You can then tweak the process to include other confirmation methods that are friendlier to their demographic group.

Contact a consumer insights service near you to learn more.


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