Digital Consumer Intelligence

In the digital era, trends and online chatter are deciding the futures of industries. Over the past few decades, there has been exponential growth in the availability of digital data. Consumers freely speak about their experiences with a brand and express their opinions on the brand’s service or products on social media. This brings digital consumer intelligence into perspective for growing businesses. Digital consumer intelligence has probably always been a smaller or bigger part of your business plan, it is only becoming more important each day. First-hand data and the insights gained from consumers via digital platforms, be they in the form of surveys or opinions via social media platforms, define digital consumer intelligence.

How does Digital Consumer Intelligence help You?

Managers often focus solely on the product or service they are offering, forgetting to listen and then react appropriately to what their customers have to say. This is one of the key steps of sustainable success for your business. Your ability to guess or predict the needs of customers will be low if you had nothing to aid you. Social listening tools source first-hand data for you making it easy for you to gain digital intelligence.

There are tools aplenty to help you gather consumer intelligence. But how does it help your business? Digital consumer intelligence is the gateway to making informed decisions, improving customer relationships and being able to know the preferences of your prospective clients.

Digital consumer intelligence begins with reference data which tells you about the audience’s location and so on. It is backed with transaction data such as a report of your customers’ activities online. Customizations to the tool allow you to gather additional insights like engagement details, real-time feedback, preferences and so on.

Key Benefits of using Digital Consumer Intelligence

Customer intelligence platforms help you understand a customer’s view of your product/service. This, in turn, makes your brand more receptive to their needs and wants which is the key to successful business growth.

Customer Engagement

Social media has made it easy to access mass attention. Digital consumer intelligence helps you track relevant comments, reviews that mention your brand or your industry. Engaging with these posts makes your audience aware of your value proposition and increases your brand visibility in general. Customer engagement gets so much easier.

Real-Time Feedback and Insights

With thousands of active social media users, data management can be difficult. Pulling out relevant data in real-time is the key feature of any digital consumer insight providing a platform. These metrics help analyze the vast amount of collected data and build on the necessary bits. Any decent platform lets you track and integrate social media pages, news boards, blogs et cetera at a centralized location.

Business Agility and Efficiency

Customers feel disappointed if their issues aren’t addressed immediately. Listening to customer feedback helps you get back to them quicker than ever. Besides tracking feedback, digital consumer insight platforms allow you to chat with prospects. A prospective customer would feel valued if they are responded to and made to feel important as your customers. Chances are they would make their purchase decision quicker than they usually would have.

A Stronger Relationship with Your Customer Base

Social listening is a proven strategy that helps you build stronger relationships with your clients. When you learn about your customer’s needs, it’s easier for you to meet them or deliver to them quickly. This makes your customers place faith in your brand. Happy customers are also staunch advocates for your brand who brings in their friends to try out your product. The cycle goes on. Gathering consumer insights is a foolproof way to gain a strong, loyal customer base.

The takeaway is really simple. By understanding customer needs, you build strong and long-lasting relationships with your audience which will help your business to grow. Digital consumer intelligence platforms help you meet customer needs better and help you to create a sense of unique value for your brand. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.

Consumer Voice can tell You the Truth About Your Value Proposition

More often than not, consumers fail to identify with brands and their value proposition. This is very common in the case of new and upcoming businesses. Companies put forth a value proposition that does not excite consumers enough for them to switch brands or try out the new ones. Every marketer looks for a unique value proposition for their company. Social listening for consumer’s voice and the insights derived thus, can take you a long way in crafting your answer for “how is your company better than others?”

Creating a Unique Value Proposition Statement

A value proposition is short and precise. It is a way to communicate to your customers what your brand stands for, what is your specialty and why they should choose your brand over others. To achieve this objective, you would want to put forth something that hits a note with the customers at one go. Listening to the online chatter and the conversations of your target customers can help you.

Wouldn’t you be very happy to hear exactly what you want to hear? Your customers love to hear and discuss the products that interest them in the same way. A company that caters to their interests would definitely attract their attention. So how do you know who is your target audience? What’s more, how do you tap into their interests?

How does Consumer Voice help?

Social media is a large and the most inexpensive focus group for a marketer. Insights and knowledge of the target market are essential for any marketing strategy to succeed. The most basic exercises a marketer needs to practice on social media are listening and engaging with consumers.

Track Consumer Voice on Social Media

54% of social media users research a product online on social media. Among these people 90.4% are millennials. Millennials are extremely tech-savvy and would post all about their experiences online. In a world relying so heavily on social media, obtaining and processing social data gets easier than ever.

Simply go online and browse through the reviews and comments. Even a glimpse of these comments will make you aware of how verbatim customers are when it comes to venting out their frustrations online. Pick up cues and insights from here. Your competitor does not have great customer service, they are priced exorbitantly high et cetera. These are the areas you could highlight in your value proposition statement.

Seek Help from Social Listening Tools

A tech-savvy world encourages users to produce millions of comments each day. At the same time, it has also put forth AI-based social listening platforms for businesses to want to access and filter out relevant data out of the noise and analyze it. Social listening tools don’t just filter out relevant comments, they can be your one-stop solution. Social listening tools help you with sentiment analysis, trending topics – throwing light on the phrases your audience is discussing the most, demographic analysis and much more.

Surveys

Old is gold. Traditional ways of conducting surveys still work, however, there are online tools that help you achieve the same. Electronic survey forms work quite similarly to the traditional ways and are a lot easier to share across the vast population present online. A massive reach gets you a better sample report. With direct surveys, you can get first-hand information right from the customer.

In conclusion, look for triggers and cues for your value proposition statement on social media and review boards. In fact, if you are already present in the market as a registered company and trying to rebrand yourself, set up a search with your brand name. Look for reviews your company has received and try to build upon that. Lastly, remember fake promises are not going to work for anyone. Listening helps you figure out areas you could work upon and advertise. However, simply including them in your company’s value proposition without any attempt to deliver the same is going to make your business suffer in the long run.

Listening and Consumer Insights Platform for Agencies

Agency owners will vouch for the fact that theirs is one of the most competitive industries.

For every agency that winds down, there are a couple that comes up. Existing large agencies are adding to their own technology stack and partnerships.

In this backdrop, it is important for agencies to add to their arsenal of tools and keep with the trends. Using consumer insight platforms is one such trend.

Why is it important for agencies to use a listening and consumer insights tool?

Using insights leads to better marketing strategies. This is an assumption that has stood the test of time. What has changed then? A couple of things:

Unlike in the past, there is a lot of consumer interaction and conversation in the public domain. A brand needs to know what is being said about them, competitors and the category.
Again, different from the past, a new source of consumer insights is available. Insights used to come from customer interviews and other market research techniques. Now, you can use this alternative data source to derive insights. And these insights can be available in real-time!

This is an opportunity for agencies – to be at the cutting edge of collecting insights and to use these to empower their customers’ strategy.

Why are real-time insights worth investing on?

The quality of consumer and category insights determines the success of a marketing strategy. Real-time makes it more powerful.

The reason is that any product flaw or operational issues bubble up immediately. Any new trends can be discovered and leveraged as is being done by forward-thinking brands. Contextual advertising by Burger King is a good example.

The deeper the insights, the more multi-dimensional the insight the better informed would be your strategy for the client.

What are the “must-have” features for an ‘agency friendly’ listening and consumer insights platform?

Here are some that come to mind, based on our own work, working with many agencies across advertising, digital and public relations.

At the outset, is the platform the best possible option for the customer? This question needs to be answered before moving to the below-mentioned considerations.
The ability to create and commission accounts for many brands.
An admin-panel to track usage, activity across all brand accounts.
Ability to be the “super-admin” or admin-to-all accounts so that you can perform activities such as adding users, changing the setup, etc.
If you can apportion the ammunition across brands, and in real-time, that would be a wonderful feature. For example, in lean periods for one brand, we can move the mentions limit to another brand.
It would be all futile if managing listening does not add to the bottom line! You should rake in a decent revenue share with the provider.
Additional revenue streams from managed services using the platform. Can you offer services such as a response service, or a brand health monitoring and escalation service? There can be many ideas, each one contributing to your topline and bottom-line.

Our own insights team (yes, we do have one!), interacted with several agency owners to create an ‘agency-friendly’ version of Auris. That wealth of information helped us address the needs of agencies.

We are looking to add to this list of features which are good for agencies. If you are an agency owner or manager, do share features you’d like to see. We are actively listening 🙂

How Social Listening helps Understand Buyer Personas

Imagine being able to be a part of an open discussion with your future clients and have them spell out their needs and expectations from your product or service! Any marketer would understand the value of being able to know the intimate details of the decision pain points of their prospective buyers. The more you hear them speak, the more you get to know about them. It will also help you speak their language, relate to them and understand them better. Social listening is the act of understanding buyer personas from a distance, as it helps you listen to their chats over social media and the conversations which happen there, practically open for all the world to see.

Social Listening for Understanding Buyer Personas – What is it?

Social media data is available to everyone and the variety of insights that can be derived from it has made market research effortless today. Understanding buyer personas help you know how to proceed with your marketing strategy, what content to put up for B2B marketing, and provides you an insight into the interests of your potential customer. By empathizing with the needs of your customers, you can attain their trust, and build a positive reputation both online and offline.

Understanding a buyer/customer’s persona – by gauging a user group’s demographics, interests, psychographics, needs et cetera can guide your marketing. A very traditional approach to gaining such intelligence would start with you asking your customers to share their opinions and comments, using surveys and questionnaires. Social listening into the chatter generated online eliminates the investment of time, cost and resources needed by such a process of extensive form filling and other means of surveying.

How does Social Listening help?

Essentially social listening is about giving your brand a human face. It helps you detect the needs of your customers and the problems they face. When you engage with your audience and deal with the issues proactively to make them believe you are listening to them and working towards solving their issues, your brand is perceived to be reliable.

Competitor Analysis

Listening to the chatter surrounding your competitors lets you know what their customers are dissatisfied about. You can also learn about the category they are targeting, and what demographics or psychographics they are going after. This will help you model your own niche segment of buyers.

Key Influencers

These days, we find that every industry has a set of key influencers who are very popular and enjoy a great following. It is a wise thing to include their viewpoints while designing your product or marketing strategy. These people influence a whole lot of people, who listen to their opinion and judgment as it roughly reflects their collective opinions as well as their pet peeves. By tracking one person, you will be able to address the needs of many.

Customer Expectations, Needs, and Opinions

Last but not least, social listening helps you track the conversations your customers are having regarding your product. You can learn what they like, dislike or want to change in your product or service. This opinion mining offers invaluable real-time feedback which is a remarkable feature of social listening. This is also what makes social listening one of the best bets into gaining business intelligence without having to invest in surveys and research reports.

In conclusion, understanding your consumer is vital to knowing your defects and to learn about the exact customer expectations your company needs to cater to. Monitoring buyer needs and opinions can also help you to discover new markets you can penetrate into.

Online Reputation Management (ORM) – The ROI Story

Analysts have spent years researching the relationship between customer sentiments expressed online and their impact on overall brand health. Online brand reputation matters for a number of logical reasons. Attempts at mapping the financial repercussions of ORM haven’t proved easy. However, researches have confirmed and established a co-relation between ORM and its ROI in two ways.

ROI for Online Reputation Management – How it Works?

The two-way approach we were talking about includes:

Top-Line Revenue Growth

The top-line revenue growth is based on either selling more products or selling products at a premium and sometimes both. As you know well, selling more of your products or selling them at a premium does not come easy. Especially the latter is rare. Top-line revenue growth is driven mostly through review management.

Driving ROI via Review Management

Review management requires you to keep requesting, monitoring and responding to reviews from customers. This is a foolproof way to drive up the rating scores. Studies have also shown that 70% of customers do leave feedback and reviews when specifically asked to do so. Moreover, there seems to be a direct correlation between review volume and ranking on Google search. The greater the number of reviews is, the higher you rank on Google Search. What more? The higher you rank, the more people review your product, the more positive light is shed on your brand, the more people click and engage with your brand. A clear illustration of how ORM helps gain more leads and affects ROI.

Driving ROI via Social Media Engagement

According to Marketing Sherpa, 95% of people within the age group of 18-34 are more likely to follow brand pages on social media. And 71% of customers who have had a positive experience with brands on social media are likely to recommend it to their friends and family (Ambassador). Social media activities are clearly related to reputation scores even if it might not be apparent at first glance.

Bottom-Line Cost Savings

This involves reducing errors while improving customer satisfaction by addressing internal operations and processes. Making them cost-effective and mechanizing labor-intensive chores helps resolve this. We found the two most viable ways to do this and they are listed below.

Automating Business Listings

People search for information about local businesses seeking their location or contact information. And Google data tells us that businesses with accurate listings are twice as likely to feature on these searches compared to others. But imagine the intense manual entry hours that go into maintaining these listings. Especially so if your company has multiple branches and varied work hours and different locations.

Automating these efforts helps your business feature quickly while at the same time saving the cost that would otherwise go into labor hours.

Outsource Social Media Management

Advertising and managing your brand’s profile on social media has its ups and downs but it is an absolutely unavoidable chore if your business is to prosper. Research has shown that earned media (what others are saying about your brand online) can impact your stock market performance. However, this is a more intense task than manually entering business listings and requires human attention based on which strategic decision calls are being made. Having to manage the business, and then trying to figure out the precise customer base, their geography and their interests, can be a hectic task. This is where you can stop fretting and seek help from third-party sources. Or if you want to be involved in the process but need some support, you could seek tools for social media listening or social media intelligence which take care of the analytical bit.

Maintaining a solid plan for online reputation management isn’t an option anymore. It is being recognized universally as a necessity in this world of competitive rivalry. You are right to consider the financial risk versus return when investing in anything, including an online reputation. But, now you can rest assured that with the right technology and correct strategy, the return on your investment will be significant in both tangible and intangible ways.

Top 15 influencers who participated in insurance discussions in India

Influencer marketing is being deployed by brands across industry verticals. Insurance is no exception.

The question though is about identifying the right influencers to engage with.

The best way is to find consumers who are influencers and are happy with their brand experience. The next best solution is to identify influencers who regularly discuss topics related to insurance and could lend “voice” to your brand.

We have used Auris to draw out a list of all influencers who engaged on topics related to insurance within India. Here is a list drawn from insurance conversations in August and September in 2019.

Authors & Bloggers

Here are some authors and prolific bloggers who engaged in conversations around insurance. They can be great advocates for your brands & initiatives.

Business Leaders

Business leaders who engage in discussions related to insurance and other financial services are good candidates to be followed. Brands can crystal-ball-gaze by consuming their publishing and tweets.

Others

Here are some other handles who engaged in discussions on insurance.

The Auris platform makes it very easy to identify influencers in each industry. Watch this video to understand how the influencer marketing tool works within Auris.

We will publish more such lists going forward. Your questions and suggestions are welcome!

Why is Social Listening Essential for the Tourism and Travel Industry

Tourism has taken the world by storm. There are thousands of travel-bloggers posting daily on social media, with an immense follower base. It is almost a universal fact that people love traveling, especially millennials. Being tech-savvy, this generation is self-sufficient when it comes to planning a trip. At For The Love Of Travel, a platform hosted by Millennials, founder Tara Cappel says “Millennials don’t just see travel as something we do, we identify with it”. For the current generation, traveling is one of the top searches. Stats show that 95% of travelers read travel reviews online before booking. 85% of travelers read around 10 reviews before they can trust a brand, and 40% of bookings are made online. What does this tell you about the future of your company in the tourism and travel industry? When your target audience is so invested in social media, it could serve the purpose of a database for consumer insights. So how does social media listening come to your rescue?

How do Tourism Companies attract Millennials?

According to the founder of ‘For The Love Of Travel’, it is good to have a great story, be socially conscious and have a lot of good reviews. Millennials do rely on their peers and count on these reviews. So naturally, the first step that follows would be to initiate the following:

Set-up Your Social Media Account and Monitor Your Brand

The basics of social media marketing require you to interact with your audience through your social media accounts. Setting up and updating your social media accounts is the number one priority which is followed by your ability to engage with your audience. You will need to keep tabs on what your audience is interested in and what it is they are talking about. It is also vital to track your social media account to know what your followers are talking about you. Tracking your online presence helps you stay alert and respond to negative reviews quickly to ensure a reputation that is intact. People rely on the Internet and online reviews to choose where to spend their money. One bad review can cost you your business and with the steep competition within the tourism and travel industry, you don’t want that.

Monitor Social Interests and Adapt

In 2018, Hanoi in Vietnam and Bournemouth in the UK were among the top trending travel destinations. In 2019, however, Xiamen in China and Normandy in France are topping the charts. Who decides what is trending? That would be the public on social media, the influencers, and the travel bloggers! User-generated content becomes the top inspiration for travelers these days. 87% of millennials on Facebook say they use social media for travel inspiration. Tracking these trends is the primary task for your business development and marketing teams.

Social Listening helps You Track the Big Players in the Tourism Industry

Social media is a rage when it comes to travel posts and numerous travel agencies and tourism companies are already capitalizing on this. According to an Adweek Survey, millennials love to have a desirable experience over a desirable item. They enjoy talking about it over social media and would use hashtags to get their posts trending. Companies are taking advantage of this by encouraging these youngsters to use branded hashtags. An eminent example is the branded hashtag put out by Texas tourism – #TexasToDo.

Tracking these hashtags is the easiest way to know about the big brands in the industry, the ones whose branded hashtags are trending. Analyzing their strategies and exploring further becomes easier once you know the names of these big players who are essentially your competitors.

Social Listening for New Leads

A very popular benefit of social listening is that it helps you identify new leads. And with a topic like travel and tourism, social media is the gold mine for you to find new leads. People get inspired by just looking at travel photos.

For most of the millennials, the planning starts right when seeing a social post. Maybe a travel blogger has posted a pic and most of the comments would start inquiring about the location, the route, the expenses, hotels, etc. This is your target audience. Start advertising to them. If not directly, research this age group, their interests and target your paid advertisements more towards them to gain more visibility and quality leads.

Since time immemorial, people have loved traveling and exploring. Sea routes and planes have been discovered in man’s quest to travel to different places and know more about this world around us. The tourism and travel industry is one that is ever booming and with the right social listening tools and other social media tactics, your business can too.

Insurance trivia from the ‘voice of the customer’

If you work on an insurance brand or are generally the curious type, you might find interesting.

We used Auris to listen in to conversations around insurance (July 2019, India only) and let it use its AI to churn insights. Using some of these insights we put together a small trivia for you.

Check whether these observations tally with what you’ve observed or have intuitively believed.

Which insurance vertical is most discussed amongst all insurance verticals?

Health. Amongst conversations in public forums (review boards, social, news boards etc.) – consumers discuss health insurance more than life or auto.

Possibly because the usage frequency of health insurance more than makes up for a relatively lower penetration? Perhaps. The national insurance scheme launched by the Government is spurring a lot more conversation than before.

An interesting correlation is that health insurance is growing faster than other non-life segments and significantly faster than life insurance segment.

What % of conversations see female participation?

Well, participation is about <20% which is very low.

The decision making as well as a pursuit with agents, customer service is mostly led by the ‘man of the house’ which reflects in the low %.

Any campaign which engages the female audience can open a new segment. Especially, health insurance, because relatively speaking females drive the healthcare portfolio within the family!

Who’s in charge of dealing with insurance-related issues, i.e., when things go south?

Well, it is predominantly males who do the heavy lifting maneuvering through paperwork, follow-ups and perhaps dealing with some red-tape along the way.

The average NPS scores are low. What drives such low scores?

Misselling & lack of transparency continues to ail the insurance sector overall. Better forms of customer education of what is covered and what’s not are important to win back the trust of the customer.

Which Indian insurance brand is most discussed in the news?

No prizes for guessing the #1 J But of course, its LIC!

Closely followed by ICICI, SBI, Aditya Birla, HDFC and Apollo Munich.

Aditya Birla stands out from this set, given the depth and width of the portfolio of the others. Apollo Munich has seen more coverage because of the M&A activity it is engaged in.

Auris for insurance helps unearth such category insights. Auris goes beyond social listening.

Consider using Auris for monitoring your insurance brand and to learn more about consumers, category and competition.

What’s a story worth telling?

What’s a story worth telling? One that drives real conversations.

Good brand managers relish the challenge of creating a brand preference in competitive categories. Of course, the real question underlying this challenge is: How do we create real conversations?

Some brands do this consistently and well.

You’d find iconic brands such as Nike do this by taking on issues which are thought-provoking, sometimes taboo. Topics which the “silent majority” relates to but does not discuss openly.

What gets this “silent majority” to express themselves? A stimulus. A stimulus which stirs the right chords within us and compels us to initiate a dialogue.

AegonLife chose such an issue and told a story which telling impact. There are many good learnings worth emulating for brands, especially in competitive categories such as insurance.

A compelling story. #BondofProtection

Important facets of the story.

The occasion. The brand chose Raksha Bandhan, a festival which celebrates the strong brother-sister bond. It should be expected that several brands would pick this occasion (and they did!). It was both an opportunity to use the occasion as well as a challenge to stand out and get the brand’s voice heard.
The issue. An issue which is not spoken about very often. The issue of accepting differences. Differences in personal preferences and beliefs.
Contextualizing. Aegon chose a storyline which connects the occasion and the issue meaningfully.
Creative. A short, but power-packed, engrossing video.
Connecting it to the brand. You’d see several “digital-only” videos but only a few which show the connection between the category and the story. The brand weaved its promise beautifully.

Watch this video and see how this creative communicates a message through a compelling story. Worth observing is how it ties in the brand’s promise around protection – “For those who protect. From those who protect”.

An impactful story.

Media spends to “boost” video views are commonplace. Do such “boosted” videos drive real conversations? From the right audience?

Media spends can drive reach. But resonance is something else. Resonance amplifies reach.

The Auris platform was used to measure impact. Here is what we learned.

The conversation volume shot up multiple times the usual. Perhaps over 100x. Important to draw the distinction between reach and conversations. The latter reflects “resonance”.

A story which struck an emotional chord. The topics of discussions reflect that the buzz was driven by emotion. Consumers relayed that the story was “real”.

A category which sees <20% participation from the female audience saw almost equal participation. Such campaigns which engage a distinct consumer segment can help expand market share. Imagine a very small slice of viewers suggesting AegonLife in dinner table discussions. Or better still imagine them buying an Aegon policy on their own.

Such storytelling is what helps a brand create a preference for itself, and in the process to transition from “also-ran” to category leaders.

Alternative data offers an alternative to market research

About 0.5% – 3% of revenues are spent on collecting consumer insights and conducting market research. Consumer brand behemoths such as Coca Cola or P&G spend significant amounts on research – and owe a lot of their success and longevity to staying close to the consumer.

Research helps create better products, concepts, and campaigns. Insights help to keep strategy aligned with the sentiment on the ground.

Our conversations with several CMOs have revealed their desire to learn more, but faster and with reduced spends.

The question is whether this is possible?

A lot has been written about how “big data” is a big deal. But “big data” is rife with what a data scientist or a market researcher would frustratingly call “noise”. Data (and a lot of it) has been available, but what has made it less usable and therefore less valuable, is our inability to extract what we need from this “mess”. Our inability to distill the key insight. Insight, which is like a needle in the haystack. So, this debilitating limitation has held us back. Until now.

But things are different today. What is different?

Three things are coming together to make us re-evaluate.

The availability of big data. Thanks to the digitization of everything under the sun, proliferation of online conversations – we have data streams coming out from every platform, device and system possible. So, yes, copious data is available.
Maturity of infrastructure to deal with this “big data”. Not long ago, the ability to deal, stack and query this data was considered an important skill. It is now omnipresent.
Finally, AI methods and the infrastructure to make these more powerful. GPUs, Transfer Learning Methods and the like make it now possible to clean the data and draw the insights which you’d like to. Our team does all of this in real-time and in the cloud. Read more here.

Alternative data is disrupting a variety of sectors. Quandl, now acquired by NASDAQ, makes it mainstream to use alternative data for investment decision making. Sentieo in the same space is referred to as an “AI-powered Bloomberg Terminal“.

Amongst these attractive avenues is one which my team is building, namely, Auris – an alternative data platform for consumer insights and market research. Using alternative data, both public and private, Auris is powering consumer insights for leading enterprise brands across industries.

Why is alternative data derived insights attractive? A few reasons for starters..

A much larger sample size, definitely significant when compared with the 100-1000 strong panels brands rely on.
Unprompted questions – most views are expressed without solicitation
Finally, and equally importantly, these insights are recent, “fresh”, real-time.

Why should innovation in market research be limited to digital surveys? Research is waiting for disruption because the combination of data + infrastructure + AI makes this viable.

Brands have begun to explore the power of alternative data. It is just the beginning.