Human insight: how marketers stop guessing and start understanding

In our 2020 CX Industry survey, 79% of marketers agreed that great CX is critical to success, yet even more, 87%, admit that their company’s overall CX needs improving. Traditionally, gathering customer feedback can be challenging. Teams who aren’t experienced researchers are tasked with:

• Preparing questions to ask participants
• Finding the right customer audience
• Finding the time to speak with customers
• Engaging with customers effectively
• Analyzing feedback efficiently
• Sharing and shaping decisions with feedback

This is probably why many marketers lean on quantitative data to inform campaign, creative, and content decisions. Unfortunately...

Data alone won't give you the full story

Hear from the team at Microsoft to understand what you’re missing if you’re not talking to customers.

Marketers play a central role in the success of modern companies—connecting products and services to customers. At the same time, they must balance business priorities like improving brand reputation, increasing customer loyalty, generating demand, driving revenue, and much more. Not to mention, the scope of responsibilities marketers face has only expanded as organizations attempt to keep up with the ever-evolving needs of the customer.

This leaves marketers little time to make decisions, often forcing them to rely on hunches gleaned from historical data and trends. Although analytics can help, they can’t explain what customers are thinking, let alone what they need. That’s essential information. To capture these actionable customer insights, marketers turn to traditional market research that typically takes far too long to fit within the already tight timelines marketing organizations are challenged with.

How human insight helps marketers

So how can marketers empower themselves to be the driving force behind a customer-centric (even obsessed) organizational mindset with what little extra time they have? This is where human insight, in the form of customer feedback, becomes a marketer’s best friend—and secret weapon. 

This is where human insight, in the form of real-time customer feedback, becomes a marketer's best friend (and secret weapon) by:

Empathy may seem immeasurable, but to marketers, it’s a benchmark to live by. Why? Because empathy drives customer loyalty, and loyalty drives ROI.

Successful companies understand the importance of nurturing a relationship with their customers which requires trust, reliability, and most of all, an emotional connection—a connection that can be informed by building empathy through human insight.

It’s nearly impossible to predict the needs and actions of others. Which is why you probably shouldn’t. While it’s true that great campaign ideas can be stumbled upon, the most successful ones need testing and iterating to meet the needs of a wide audience, not just the needs of some.

Understand your customer throughout the campaign process

If you haven’t guessed already, there’s no better way to understand what your customers need than by asking them. 

Understanding your customer, throughout every point in your campaign process, is a tried-and-true method for getting insights that save you time, money, and resources—all while driving customer loyalty through empathy.

Marketers play a central role in connecting products and services to customers. Quickly fine-tuning positioning, messaging, and campaigns to align with the ever-changing needs of customers, marketers must still balance business priorities like improving brand reputation, increasing customer loyalty, generating demand, driving revenue, and much more.

As marketers, we traditionally rely on data to guide our decisions. We run A/B tests. We use robust analytics tools. We find out where customers are converting, and where they’re not. We know exactly what our customers are doing.

But there’s one major problem: we don’t always understand why.

If you’re like most marketers, you’ve probably seen your campaign performance or site analytics and wondered what’s going on inside your customers’ heads. What were they thinking when they abandoned their order? Or when they bounced from a landing page after just five seconds? Why did they unsubscribe from your email list? Would they have converted if you had a different design? Or different copy?

You may suspect you know the answers to these questions, but unless you hear it straight from the source, you’re really just guessing. Now more than ever, it’s critical that marketers understand their customers’ attitudes, motivations, and reactions so they can understand what content will resonate with customers and what will drive them to convert.

Quickly take the guesswork out of your campaigns