How to discover insights that can be used for marketing from data

Update date:2024.06.28 Column

In today's world where competition between companies is intensifying, marketing is an essential element for business success. However, as the market environment becomes more complex, it is becoming more difficult to accurately grasp customer needs and measures to grow a business using traditional marketing methods alone.

To solve this problem, let's look at how you can mine data for actionable insights for your marketing.

table of contents

What insights can you use in your marketing?
Understand the relationship between "data," "information," and "insights"
- "Data," "information," and "insights" in a business context
How to discover insights
Examples of how insights can be used in marketing
My Feelings, Then and Now

What insights can you use in your marketing?

In marketing, insight refers to understanding the underlying motivations and reasons behind your customers' actions, thoughts, and emotions.

Specifically, it is important to clarify why customers choose (or don't choose) a certain product or service, what their needs and desires are, what values and beliefs they hold, etc. This will allow you to find approaches and messages to more effectively promote your products and services.

In other words, marketing insights provide important clues for making your products and services more attractive to customers.

Understand the relationship between "data," "information," and "insights"

First, let's use an example to re-understand how "data," "information," and "insights" are related to each other.

Taking art as an example, the brushstrokes and colors of a painter's painting are "data."

A painting by an artist, for example a landscape of a lake and mountains, is the "information" that we see.

Understanding that this scene is Mount Fuji seen in autumn from Lake Kawaguchi is "insight."

"Data," "information," and "insights" in a business context

Data is generated from facts and comes in many forms, including numbers, images, audio and video files, and computer-readable values. Data is a basic unit that can be measured and stored and transmitted. Virtually every company generates data, but in its raw (unprocessed) form, it's not particularly useful.

So we process, organize, visualize, etc. the data so that we can harvest information from it. Information is data that has been collected, aggregated, and organized.

Putting information in context and adding knowledge, experience, etc. to interpret it gives you insight. Information alone helps us observe what is happening, but insight explains why. In a business context, insight is a key factor in decision making.

How to discover insights

Here are some methods you can use to obtain data and information to uncover insights.

1. Collect industry news and reports

By collecting industry news and reports, you can understand market trends and the competitive situation, such as the trends of competitors offering the same products or services, and the market trends of the entire industry.

2. Conduct customer research

Customer research involves understanding customer opinions and needs through questionnaires, interviews, etc. By asking about opinions and areas for improvement regarding your company's products and services, and comparing them with competitors, you can develop a more specific marketing strategy.

5. Visualize the data

Data visualization plays a key role in unearthing insights by transforming complex data into a clear and actionable picture, allowing marketers to easily identify customer behaviors, trends, and correlations, providing valuable insights that lead to informed decision-making and effective marketing.

·Related article:
Data usage examples for visualizing marketing effects

4. Use web analytics

Web analytics is the analysis of website access and behavior. Using tools such as Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics, you can understand user visit history, page views, conversion rates, etc. By analyzing this data, you can understand customer needs and behavior.

5. Use social media analytics

Social media analysis is the analysis of user behavior and reactions on social media such as SNS. By understanding the frequency of hashtag use, number of shares, number of comments, etc., you can understand interest and reputation in products and services.

6. Conduct cross-channel analysis

Cross-channel analysis is the comprehensive analysis of customer behavior across multiple channels. For example, by combining website behavior with responses on social media, you can get a more detailed picture of your customers.

Related solutions:
Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) Analysis

Examples of how insights can be used in marketing

Here are some concrete examples of insight discovery.

Example 1: Restaurant chain using sales data

A coffee chain tracks sales data by day and time of day.

If you aggregate this data for morning, afternoon, and evening and visualize it in a graph, you can see that sales are particularly low in the morning hours.

Digging deeper into the sales data, we see that in-store sales are very low. The reason for low morning sales could be attributed to customer commutes and customer behavior. For example, we can hypothesize that many people are in a rush to get to work, prioritizing convenience and time efficiency over sitting down and enjoying coffee or other food and beverages.

Therefore, in order to increase sales in the mornings, coffee chains can work on improving their services to suit the time of day, such as expanding their breakfast menus to include more convenient take-out items and offering discounts on take-out coffee.

In this way, data can be used to gain insights that can lead to improved marketing.

Example 2: Sporting goods manufacturer uses social media analytics

A sporting goods manufacturer collects tweet data about its products.

First, we performed a text analysis of the tweets to extract the most frequently occurring keywords. As a result, we found that keywords such as "running shoes," "wear," and "futsal" appeared frequently.

We also aggregated the time of day tweets were posted to identify the most active times of day, with tweets peaking on weekday evenings and weekend afternoons.

In addition, we collected attribute information of the users who posted the tweets and conducted an analysis based on those attributes. We found that men in their 20s to 40s posted the most tweets about sporting goods.

Based on this data, sporting goods manufacturers can consider the following marketing measures:

A social media campaign will be run targeting men in their 20s to 40s during peak posting times when customers are most active on social media. The campaign will collaborate with influencers who are influential among the target demographic and use the company's running shoes, sportswear, and other products to attract their attention. In addition, by taking up popular topics such as "futsal" that emerged in the text analysis of tweets and emphasizing the appeal of the company's products related to the topics, the company will be able to effectively increase brand awareness among its target audience and promote conversions.

In this way, social media analytics can provide insights that can lead to improved marketing.

Example 3: Automotive manufacturer using cross-channel analytics

A certain automobile manufacturer uses TV commercials, web ads (display and search), SNS ads, email newsletters, etc. as marketing strategies. For each advertising channel, data such as cost, conversion rate, click rate, etc. was collected and analyzed.

As a result, it was found that click-through rates and conversion rates on advertising channels other than television tend to increase during the period when a television commercial is aired.

This suggests that the TV ad may have piqued customers' interest and that they may be actively seeking additional information about the brand and product through digital channels. Additionally, the improved performance of social media and web ads during the TV ad airing period suggests that customers may respond positively to a cross-channel approach.

This suggests that customers may be influenced by multiple touchpoints across different channels, highlighting the importance of a unified marketing strategy to ensure a seamless customer journey.

In this way, by analyzing cross-channel data, you can adjust your marketing activities to match customer preferences and behavior, optimize cross-channel strategies, and achieve more cost-effective marketing.

My Feelings, Then and Now

Extracting insights from data that can be used for marketing is an essential element in creating a more effective marketing strategy. There are various methods, such as web analysis, social media analysis, customer surveys, collection of industry news and reports, visualization of information through data analysis, and cross-channel analysis. Choose the most suitable method to discover insights according to your company's objectives, needs, and available data.

Our company, XICA, has over 10 years of experience in consulting and service development in the field of data science in marketing, and has supported over 250 companies, mainly major corporations. Our specialized data scientists and consultants support the optimal use of data analysis according to the needs and objectives of our client companies.

Click here to learn more about XICA's marketing solutions .

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