How to find consumer insights

Consumer insights can come from almost any source. This includes everything from your own website data to social media interactions to online reviews of your business.

But while these sources may vary, you can always rely on tried-and-true methods to gather, analyze, and implement consumer insights. The following tips will help you make the absolute most of consumer insights for maximum business success.

1. Start with firsthand customer insights

Just as the clearest, most intuitive solution is often the correct one in life, so it is with consumer insights. Where can you gain some of the best insights in some of the greatest quantities? From your own customers!

Particularly if you’re just getting started, it’s good to begin where you already have access. Start with basic qualitative data-gathering via features like surveys and chat boxes. Here are some specific ways to gather customer feedback on your own platform(s):

• Add short customer surveys to your website. Emphasis on the “short” – these should be just 1-3 questions, with a range of answers to choose from (e.g. “Rate this product from 1-5”). If all someone has to do is tick a box, they’ll be much more likely to answer.

• Create polls, Q&As, and other interactive posts on social media. Your social media followers are typically a combination of loyal customers and potential customers; this makes social media invaluable for learning both a) what people already love about your business, and b) what they’d need in order to convert in the future.

• Pay attention to comments and reviews. Online comments and reviews are crucial sources of consumer insights. People may be more honest when not asked questions directly, and/or bring up elements you hadn’t thought to ask about beforehand – so pay close attention to this kind of feedback.

• Send out longer feedback forms via email. This one requires more effort on the customer’s part, so use it sparingly. For instance, you might only send out a detailed feedback form every six months, or after a customer has purchased a certain number of products. If you can offer a small incentive to fill out the form, all the better!

As touched on above, remember you can’t be too pushy or invasive when gathering these insights – otherwise customers will stop answering your questions, and may even abandon your business. So keep feedback requests to a minimum, and keep the offers flowing to stay on the customer’s good side.

In the words of Gary Vaynerchuk: “Give, give, give, then ask.”

2. Pursue more advanced tactics

Once you’ve mastered the art of the customer survey – or if you want to start gathering a wider range of insights right away – you can try more advanced tactics. Most of these are subtler than simply asking for feedback, so you can get information without bothering your customers too much; the flip side is that they may be more complicated to implement.

That said, if you’re ready to make serious progress, here are some ideas:

• Find out which terms people are searching to find you. Use tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, and Google Search Console to look into the top search queries for your business. That way, you can tailor your offerings to customers’ wants and needs, helping you rank higher for relevant queries and improve conversion overall.

• Use Google Analytics to gain insights about demographics, traffic, and more. You can also use Google Analytics to determine the exact source of your traffic (organic search, referrals, direct traffic, etc.). The current iteration of GA4 can also provide insights on user demographics, as well as engagement, retention, and conversion events.

• Track the customer journey on your website. You might also look into software that records user sessions to see how people are navigating your website. This allows you to see where customers typically “get stuck” and drop off in the conversion funnel – making it especially useful for businesses which have high traffic but low conversion.

• Consider running a study or focus group. Finally, if you want to go all-out on consumer insights, why not pull together a long-term study or customer focus group? These in-depth methods can provide incredible insights on major business decisions, so if you have an important launch or strategy meeting coming up, definitely consider it.

3. Take a deep dive into competitor insights

Speaking of going in-depth, let’s cover an area we’ve barely touched on so far: competitor insights. Though they’ll often come from similar sources to your own customer insights, it’s important to evaluate competitor insights separately.

Doing this will give you a clear picture of potential areas of improvement for your business – as well as where you are already on the right track. On that note, here’s how to gather valuable competitor insights:

• Read their reviews and other public content. Time to return to those basic qualitative measures – only now you should scour your competitors’ online reviews, comments, social media accounts, and any other public content to compare with yours.

• Be wary that some businesses will try to conceal poor feedback online. To ensure you’re getting the full picture, scroll through multiple reviews/comments/etc. and note which ones have received more “likes” from other users. This is arguably one of the best ways to gather shopper insights about people who are actually making key purchases.

• Examine their products or services closely. Looking at your competitors’ offerings is an excellent way to identify gaps in your own business. Take note not just of what your competitors offer, but also how they’re promoting it, what the reviews say, and how many other competitors are offering the same thing.

• Use specialty tools for “invisible” insights. Having gathered these relatively “visible” insights, you can gain even deeper understanding with “invisible” insights as well. Use tools like Semrush and Screaming Frog to discover which queries your competitors are ranking for and how these correspond to their offerings; collect their landing page titles and compare them to your own; and so on.

4. Aggregate your data for better analysis

Having collected all this data, you’ll need to organize it somehow! In fact, you should be organizing as you go, to avoid losing anything important. One of the best ways to approach this is to centralize all your consumer insights in one place – whether that’s a folder on Google Drive, a single master spreadsheet, or even a tool specifically designed for data aggregation.

If you’re starting from scratch, you can build templates to display and analyze your consumer insights as effectively as possible. For example, you might have a master Google Sheet called “Consumer Insights” with tabs for each of your sources: Reviews, Surveys, GA4 Insights, etc. (dividing this however makes sense for your business). Within each tab, you’d have labeled columns to help consistently format your consumer insights and sort through them later. 

To give a simple example, the columns for your Reviews tab might be:

• Review source (e.g. Google reviews, Yelp, Trustpilot, Instagram)

• Star rating (for review platforms like Yelp which have this)

• Review content (what the reviewer actually said about your business)

• Comments (notes on the reviewer’s profile, how many “likes” their review received, connections to other consumer insights, etc.)

• Takeaways (quick summary of insights and actions to take from that review)

You now have a ready-made sheet to fill in as you gather consumer insights. Just make sure you tailor the columns in each tab to the data within it! Don’t be afraid to get really specific with your columns, if it will help you evaluate these insights better in the long run.

Indeed, in addition to organizing your data, make sure you are constantly comparing and synthesizing to gain the most valuable insights about your business. These “super insights” from aggregated data will guide your business for years to come, and may even determine your future success in product development, marketing, and more.

5. Use consumer insights for all business decisions

This last point might sound obvious, but it’s vital: all that careful organization and analysis means nothing if you don’t apply it to your business – and that’s across the board.

Certainly, you might create a targeted survey or run a bespoke campaign to gain insights about one specific thing. But after you’ve made tweaks to that one thing, don’t forget about all the other insights you gained throughout the process.

That’s why centralizing your data is so important: it keeps consumer insights aggregated and accessible, allowing you to continuously apply them to all future business decisions.

On that note, our final bit of advice would be to give all key decision-makers full access and clarity on consumer insights. While it’s good to exercise caution, most businesses have more to lose by not being transparent internally than by sharing too much. So don’t hoard your consumer insights – remember, your team needs them to do their best work, which is the whole point of having them in the first place.