How Customer Insight can Shape Your Marketing

Understanding your customers, particularly your existing customers, has always been an important element in successful marketing. Ultimately through this understanding it is possible to target the right people, at the right time with the right message. To achieve this however, it’s vital to have data at your disposal, data which can be effectively segmented and used for marketing and advertising functions.

Such a point was recently reiterated by the head of marketing and communications at the Chartered Institute of Marketing, Ray Jones. Mr Jones emphasised the importance of learning as much as possible about existing customers and using such information to provide better marketing material. He also highlighted that segmenting customers along the lines of wants and needs and developing plans to appeal to these desires should be a priority for all businesses.

Gathering data which can be segmented and profiled to provide a platform for effective, targeted marketing has long been a key principle of customer insight at EWA. Customer insight and data analysis has a vital role to play in marketing, look at companies such as Amazon or Play that send emails filled with products which customers are the most likely to buy based upon a plethora of data and the behaviour of other customers within their segment.

Whilst they may not always get it right, companies like Amazon do use their data to the greatest effect. They ensure that the insight they gain from it is never wasted and consistently use it to shape marketing campaigns based upon segmented data and not supposition.

Much can be learnt from such activities for all businesses but the primary lesson here is to understand that the data you collect as part of your customer insight activities needs to be handed over to your marketing department or agency. Fail to do this and your marketing is unlikely to speak to your customers in the right way. Do this however and it can help you to garner the largest ROI from marketing and improve the lifetime value of each customer through targeted, relevant and timely communications.