Customer Insight Power Tools: Level Up Your Game

Compared to new brands with little to no insights-driven business (IDB) capabilities, mature businesses with advanced IDB are eight times more likely to report at least 20% growth, according to Forrester’s 2022 report, “The State Of The Insights-Driven Business.” Leveraging customer insights tools can help companies understand what their audiences want, find new revenue opportunities, and ensure their brands stand out among competitors. This blog post takes a closer look at the value of customer insights.

Customer Insight Tools

Forrester’s report details how insights-driven organizations find more opportunities and enjoy greater market advantages. Brands that invest in insights capabilities, which include customer insight tools, can maximize their customer data’s potential. Below are some popular tools used to procure customer insights:

YouTube Analytics. Part of the popular online platform, this tool helps brands and channel owners understand their video performance using key metrics and reports. YouTube Analytics also provides customer (or viewer) insights through metrics like audience retention, audience sentiment, online watching habits, watch time, top geographies, and related content that viewers watched. 

Google Trends. This tool offers a high-level overview of the popularity of keywords and search terms on Google. It provides customer insights by identifying trending searches, gauging audience interest by region and time period, analyzing keyword comparisons, and ranking related search topics. 

Google Analytics. Part of the Google Marketing Platform, this tool provides brands with statistics and basic analytics for tracking website traffic. Google Analytics (GA) extracts customer insights by determining top sources of visitor traffic, highlighting user engagement patterns, ascertaining user demographics, and segmenting audiences for analysis. Both versions of GA (free and paid) are essential tools for search engine optimization initiatives.

Facebook Audience Insights. This Facebook Business tool helps brands target the right audiences with their page content. It provides insight into current and potential audiences via demographic data, including age, gender, education, relationship status, and more. It also identifies consumer interests, hobbies, and lifestyles to help creators connect relevant content with target audiences. 

Customer Data Platforms. While previous examples of customer insight tools come as part of the commercial user capabilities for each of these sites, a customer data platform (CDP) is a collection of software designed to help companies manage customer data. These tools ingest data to unify customer profiles and create a single customer view (SCV) for digital marketing initiatives. Mid-range CDPs provide insights by creating a rich customer data foundation for analysis and activation. 

All of the tools above can provide a certain amount of helpful information about audiences, customers, and users and enable brands to make better, more informed decisions. None of these tools, however, is as powerful or useful for organizations as a top-shelf CDP, which can produce actionable insights using a robust array of features. Let’s examine them one by one. 

Customer Data Platform Capabilities 

CDPs are, in essence, unified customer databases that stitch customer profiles together using all available data from internal and external sources. Each of a CDP’s capabilities helps create rich, productive insights that companies can use to boost their bottom lines. 

CDPs Collect and Centralize Data 

Good data produces good insights. The more complete the data collected about customers, the deeper the insights produced. An enterprise customer data platform stands out from other customer insights tools due to the breadth of data it is capable of collecting, including:

• Online and offline. Customer behavior and interactions on digital channels and in physical locations.
• Mobile. Customer activity on mobile sites and brand apps.
• Customer service. Interactions between support agents and consumers.
• Sales. Purchase histories, prospects and leads, and abandoned transactions.
• Advertising. Data from ad platforms like Google Ads.

Instead of relying on one type of customer data like search, or social media activity, a CDP ingests all data—including real-time, bulk, and streaming—to make sure brands don’t miss any available data points for customer insight analysis. In addition, enterprise CDPs centralize all customer data in one place to create a single source of truth for marketing, sales, and service teams. 

CDPs Unify Customer Profiles 

After collecting all available data points, CDPs stitch these together to form unified customer profiles. A CDP can use either deterministic or probabilistic matching to identify customer data. Deterministic matching searches for identifiers like usernames or emails to pin down a customer’s identity. Probabilistic matching uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to estimate the likelihood that a data point like an IP address, browser, or device belongs to a specific customer. 

Unified profiles allow brands to know who their customers are and follow their journeys in detail. Such information helps brands understand and improve customers’ experiences to help drive conversion. 

CDPs Segment Audiences

Complete data and unified customer profiles set the stage for enterprise CDPs to segment audiences accurately. Top-shelf CDPs can segment customers by:

• Attribute
• Behavior
• Actions taken and not taken
• Activity on digital channels
• Journey stages
• And other categories

Audience segmentation leads to better conversion rates, more cost-effective marketing, and more efficient advertising because brand actions are locked on a specific group of targets. Brands can also gather more concentrated insights from a select segment than compared to a wider, more heterogeneous audience. 

CDPs Apply AI and Machine Learning Techniques

Leaning on its customer data foundation, enterprise CDPs wield AI and Machine Learning (ML) techniques to produce actionable insights. Advanced tools like AI and ML can process millions of data points to uncover trends and patterns in customer behavior, which brands can use to predict specific outcomes. Customer insights include: 

• Common traits among high-value audiences
• Customers at risk of churn
• High-performing channels and touchpoints
• Untapped opportunities in the customer journey
• The Next-best Action (NBA) with the highest chance of successful conversion

A CDP equips brands with actionable insights to drive results and impact the bottom line by revealing new opportunities, improving customer experiences, and making data-driven decisions. 

In summary, customer insights tools like YouTube Analytics, Google Trends, Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights, and mid-range customer data platforms can help brands understand audiences better. However, top-shelf enterprise CDPs give brands the most value because they can collect and centralize data, unify profiles, segment audiences at granular levels, and apply AI/ML techniques to develop useful insights. 

Become Insights-Driven With Treasure Data

Not all CDPs are created equal. Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud helps companies become insights-driven by collecting and centralizing customer data, unifying profiles, and analyzing journeys to surface hidden trends in customer behavior. 

Power up customer insights with Treasure Data’s capabilities:

• Omnichannel data collection and centralization
• Customer profile unification using online + offline data
• Customer journey analysis and orchestration
• Latest AI technology with machine learning algorithms
• Personalization at scale
• Next-best Action recommendation engine

Shiseido is one of the global companies partnering with Treasure Data to drive growth through insights-driven personalization and engagement. Treasure Data helped Shiseido centralize all customer data sources, analyze behavior and preferences, and segment audiences for a one-to-one marketing program. Shiseido enjoyed the following results:

Read Shiseido’s story here. 

To learn more about how you can leverage Treasure Data as a customer insights tool to drive results and growth, consult an expert today. Want to learn more? Request a demo, call 1.866.899.5386, or contact us for more information.