How connected insights can help you become a customer-centric brand

The perfect tagline. The ideal marketing channels. The best-selling new product. 

You likely already have a ton of consumer data that can give you transformative insights into who your customers are and what they want from your brand.

But for most companies, customer data is siloed away across a number of platforms and systems. For the average company, this data is scattered between more than 75 tech tools — whether it’s CRMs, survey tools, AI-chat support logs or social media management platforms. 

The information is waiting for you. But you may not have the systems in place to systematically connect, centralize and analyze your customer data and apply its learnings. 

Enter connected insights: 

The process of connecting company insights and data across a business, centralizing it and using it across teams to inform decision making and strategy.

Connected insights is all about building a holistic view of the consumer and putting them at the center of every decision you make. 

"To put the consumer at the heart of decision-making, and to gain ongoing strategic advantage, brands need to consolidate their advertising data. Brands that connect their data and insights across projects, business units, markets and teams, can unlock meta-learning, which benefits the brand as a whole."

- Nataly Kelly, CMO, Zappi

In this post, I’ll give you an in-depth look at what connected insights are, show you how to apply them and run you through some of the best connected insights tools out there. 

In our recent report on the state of connected insights, we found that 69% of respondents said that consumer insights were massively influential when it came to business decision making. Even though that’s the case, 38% say that insights work is housed within a separate team — this suggests that nearly 40% of insights are not connected. 

A company culture that goes all in on connected insights ditches ad hoc projects and disconnected platforms and systems in favor of systemizing and centralizing their data. AI analytics and centralization is embraced to help uncover deeper consumer insights and share them across departments. Consumer feedback isn’t siloed away with the insights team but is instead democratized and used across teams to guide strategy. 

Rather than placing the consumer on the periphery of strategy, the consumer is placed at the heart of it. 

This allows marketers and other teams to unlock new levels of consumer understanding.

59% of respondents in our report said that consumer insights aren’t handled systematically. 

This means that the majority of their consumer insights are siloed away in separate tools or systems or in the hands of a dedicated team or outside vendor that’s treated as an order taker rather than a strategic partner — preventing companies from drawing deeper wisdom from their consumer data.

By connecting tools and centralizing your data on a single platform, you can analyze your data more efficiently and make sure you have consistent access to reliable, actionable insights into consumers.

Based on our research, systematized and connected insights are a huge driver for high levels of satisfaction on both the team and project level. 

44% of companies said the biggest benefit of systematizing and centralizing consumer data was gaining more actionable insights, with 57% planning to implement a tool to centralize this data over the next twelve months.

“Competing in today’s world demands a different approach to insight. Historically dis-connected, siloed operations focusing on their narrow field of business and competing for share of attention amongst business decision makers are no longer able to drive a competitive advantage.” - KPMG 

There are several benefits to connecting consumer data and insights across your company. 

Connected insights support a culture of customer centricity. 

Companies that build their business and brand around their customers outpace competitors on both revenue and market share. Gartner found that marketers who listen to their customers see 1.6 times more growth. 

“Data-driven information and inspiration can reduce uncertainty and enhance creativity in the innovation process.” - Jianxi Luo, Researcher

The more accessible your consumer data is, the more you can learn from it. 

Connected insights tell you who your customers are and what they think of your brand, marketing and products. 

You can use connected insights to track customers’ responses to your brand over time, answering questions like: Which campaigns resonate best with our customer segments? Which ad elements are increasing engagement the most? Which product concepts show the most potential? What characterizes the strongest and weakest performing competitor ads? 

By systematizing and centralizing your customer data, you can:

1. Spot patterns in customers’ behavior and preferences and understand consumers on a deeper level.

2. Cut through the anxiety and doubt that dampens innovation by having the data to back your decisions. 

3. Support the development of successful product launches and marketing campaigns by understanding what consumers want from the earliest stages of campaign and product development. 

4. Create ads that immediately resonate with your audience. 

5. Enhance and personalize the customer experience. 

6. Improve customer retention and brand loyalty — customer-centric companies saw a 25% increase in customer loyalty. 

 Let’s take a look at some of the ways you can use connected insights.

There are several ways you can use connected insights across your organization.

Some of the best uses include:

1. Ad creation 

2. Ad development  

3. Concept testing for a new product 

4. Competitive audits 

5. To uncover patterns and trends across your campaigns 

6. To integrate quantitative and qualitative data to enhance consumer insights 

Let’s review some of the most effective uses of connected insights. 

Get a holistic understanding of your ads 

"The top issue that bothers me is when brands conduct their consumer research on a project basis, testing one ad at a time, instead of taking a more holistic, human view.”

- Nataly Kelly, CMO, Zappi

The move towards becoming a consumer-centric brand requires you to track, analyze and store consumer responses to your ads as a whole. To get a full picture of your consumer and how they engage with your creative, you need to ditch ad hoc testing in favor of a holistic view. 

Here’s our CMO Nataly Kelly:

“When insights processes happen on an ad hoc basis, the consumer sits at the periphery instead of at the center. When brands test ads and don’t even store their data in any platform or system, insights are obtained on a one-off basis. When that data doesn’t get integrated into a broader ecosystem, the focus is only on the point-in-time impact.”

Centralize your quantitative and qualitative ad testing, research and analytics to understand how consumers are impacted by your ads over time. 

Make use of platforms that bring together different research methods and can provide advanced data analytics that can help you understand how consumers perceptions, emotions and behavior are impacted by your ads and campaigns. 

By approaching your research and analysis in a holistic way, you can track and compare insights over time and build a well-rounded view of who your customer is, from the background music they love to the values they want to see expressed in your ads. 

Get insights into your strongest ads

Connected insights can show you which of your ads are the strongest and why. 

Through connected insights, you can bring together a range of research tools and advanced analytics processes to track your ads and dig deeper into how consumers are responding to them. 

You can use connected insights tools to simplify KPI tracking and consistently measure a number of key metrics across ads such as engagement, brand awareness and the level of influence on buying behaviors.

By assessing different KPIs using connected platforms, you can keep track of ad performance over time and easily compare the performance of your strongest and weakest ads.

Measure the impact of different ad elements 

Connected insights can also show you which elements of your ads are working best with your audience frame-by-frame. For example, you can use tools like Zappi’s Amplify Ad System to track and measure behavioral responses such as ad skipping to understand which elements of your ad are hitting the mark and which ones are negatively impacting engagement. 

You can layer this data with data from in-app surveys and ask consumers for their responses to different elements of your ad — either as they’re watching to track real-time responses or after they’ve finished the ad and have time to reflect on its impact.

You can also use Amplify to measure emotional responses to ads via an emoji system, which you can use to measure both emotional response and emotional intensity. 

By bringing together different tools and strategies, you can uncover layer-upon-layer of insights into consumers’ responses to different elements of your ad.

And by integrating your tools and data to make your insights easily accessible, it’s easier to integrate your learnings and use them to create stronger ads from the earliest stages of development. 

Understand what characterizes the strongest and weakest performing competitor ads 

The more you can pool data on consumers’ response to competitors’ ads, the bigger your competitive advantage. 

Connected insights tools can help you understand how consumers think and feel about competitors’ ads in their own voice: 

Whether consumers love a competitor's tagline, hate their background track or find their slap-stick humor irritating. 

Use sentiment analysis and social listening tools to learn what consumers are saying about competitor ads online. These tools use AI algorithms and natural language processing to track consumers’ brand, product and campaign mentions on competitors across social media.

You can layer this data over your own in-house tests against competitor ads byasking consumers to watch your ad and an ad of your competitors and then survey them on their response. 

While sentiment analysis and social listening can provide breadth of voice-of-consumer data, in-house testing and surveys can deliver depth — giving you a fuller picture of how consumers think and feel about your ads vs your competitors’ ads. 

Track changes in key metrics from old to new ad campaigns 

Shifting your ethos towards one of consumer centricity means staying responsive to how consumers are responding to your ads over time, rather than relying on the snapshot learning of ad-hoc tests.  

To systematically approach consumer data analysis and derive holistic learnings from your data, it’s important to track metrics across your ad campaigns. 

Whether you want to track and understand measures such as brand appeal, relevance or enjoyment, set your benchmark metrics and track shifts throughout your campaigns to understand whether consumers’ responses to your campaigns are changing over time.  

Shape early-stage ideation and development 

At Zappi, we believe in running quality research early and often. For your campaigns to be successful, you need to know exactly what consumers want from you and why at the earliest stages of campaign or product development. 

Concept testing can illuminate which of your concepts have the strongest market potential. Consumers can give you essential insights into how to optimize your concepts. 

Concept test to make sure you have consumer feedback from the start of innovation development. It’s important to factor in both consumer sentiment and perception with developing your research approach. 

For instance, you can build a survey and ask consumers: 

1. To rate the appeal of your concept use a point–based scale to measure consumer interest.

2. To share which emotions your concept evoked and how strongly they felt them. 

3. For their rating over key measures like relevancy, uniqueness, believability and brand feeling.

4. For their key takeaway with an open-ended question: "Other than making you more or less interested in the product/service, what is the main thing that this product is trying to tell you?" 

5. How likely the concept is to lead to behavioral change, using an open-ended question such as, “Based on everything you've seen, how likely are you to [action] the [noun]?"

6. General suggestions for improvement.

Incorporate systematic learning 

The essence of connected insights is the use of your consumer research to create a stronger foundation for success.

Using real-time continuous consumer feedback to test, improve and create products and creative that put consumers at the center of development. 

This means you:  

1. Kickstart creative development with your learnings from previous research.

2. Begin with a summarized analysis of your past research: identifying pockets of excellence and weaknesses.

3. Bring fluidity to the creative process: collect consumer insights as you go — incorporate consumer research into each stage of your campaign or innovation development and integrate your learnings.

Read on for some of the best connected insights use cases.

1. Sephora 

In their customer research, Sephora found that customers would use their mobiles to look up product reviews and get recommendations online for products they were looking at in-store.

In response, Sephora developed the Sephora mobile app. The app provides product reviews, recommendations, AI makeup try-ons and pricing information. 

Beyond supporting the customer journey, Sephora uses the app to collect data on customers’ preferences and shopping habits, allowing them to build detailed customer profiles.

Sephora integrates this data with their ad data on Google Analytics 360 Suite to get a deeper understanding of how customers’ interactions with online ads lead to an in-store purchase.

Mary Beth Laughton EVP of Omni Retail says:

"If a customer browsed online then bought in store, we can see that. We just weren't looking at it before, but it's a win for both channels. We had good relationships across our channels, but we weren't collaborating or finding synergies, and we were maximizing business in isolation. We're more aligned, and we can move faster across in-store, online and mobile strategies. Mobile is the glue that holds it all together."

2. Nike 

Nike collects first-party customer data including data on online browsing behavior, workout habits, product preferences and purchase history across its apps and website. 

In 2018 and 2019, Nike acquired the predictive analytics companies Zodiac and Celect. Zodiac and Celect help Nike collect and analyze consumer data from their apps as well as IoT devices like Fitbits, turning these insights into personalized in-app product and content recommendation.

Elizabeth Mixson explores how Nike connects insights with the Nike Fit app:

“The Nike Fit app uses a combination of computer vision, data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence to cultivate a digital foot morphology based on 13 data points. Not only does this help the app make more informed product recommendations, Nike can also use this data to design better fitting shoes down the line. 

In addition, when a Nike App “member” walks into a Nike store, the app goes into in-store mode. The user can then scan items to learn more, request items be brought to them to try on and reserve items for purchase. All of this data is then used by Nike to provide the member with personalized product recommendations and content based on their past, real-world shopping behavior.”

3. SoFi

“If you’re sitting in a room with a creative director, art director and copywriter making an ad, you’re going to be clouded by your own opinions. You need some outside perspective. That’s what Zappi enables us to do. Understand what real people think.”

- Jean-Michel Hoffman, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at SoFi

As a customer-centric brand looking to more deeply understand their customers’ needs, wants and preferences, SoFi used Zappi to bring consumers into the early stages of their ad development process. The marketing team used Zappi to test out of their ad ideas and uncover which ones would resonate best with their customers.  

Zappi supported SoFi to build their iteration around real-time consumer insights. SoFi used Zappi’s Creative Suite to iterate, optimize and validate its ads through quantitative and qualitative ad evaluation and diagnosis. 

Lauren Stafford-Webb, SoFi’s CMO, highlights how the marketing team approach ad analysis and consumer research with Zappi:

“The improvement in ad effectiveness comes down to rapid iteration,” says Lauren. “An example of how our day works. We have a couple of edits. We throw them into Zappi in the morning. Within 3-4 hours we have both qual and quant feedback on all key metrics — favorability, uniqueness, consideration. We can walk away and say ‘OK, these are the changes we need to make’ and by the end of the day I have 3 new edits.”

Since adding Zappi to their tech stack, SoFi has seen a 20% increase in ad effectiveness, while their ads performed significantly better than the others in their category.

Read the full customer story here. 

Zappi

Zappi brings together consumer data and AI — giving you access to fully connected insights. You can use Zappi’s AI-supported innovation and ad system to support ongoing consumer research across the entire development cycle of your ads and products.

“A big benefit of the platform is being able to look back and see what worked and what didn't and theme the learning to focus on better product options in the future. We have learnings we can now apply and get smarter.”

- Amanda Addison, McDonald’s Senior Manager, US Menu Insights

Zappi integrates innovation, advertising and brand insights into a single consumer insights platform — giving you access to all the data you need to move towards customer centricity. 

Segment

A customer data platform (CDP) is a software application that you can use to collect and centralize first-party customer data from multiple sources, making it readily accessible.

CDPs can collect data from:

• Customer support interactions  

• Interactions with sales teams 

• Marketing campaigns 

• Social media

• Your website 

• Email 

• Systems like enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and data management platforms (DMPs)

• Customer surveys 

Twilio’s Segment is one of the best CDPs for enriching customer data and developing detailed customer profiles. 

Segment offers 450+ pre-built connectors, giving you real-time access to data on:

1. Buying behaviors 

2. Demographics 

3. Behavioral data (such as consumers’ interactions across your marketing channels) 

Segment offers generative and predictive AI capabilities that you can use to predict customer behavior and build personalized campaigns. 

Reputation 

Reputation is a social listening tool that you can use to find out what consumers are saying about your competitors’ brands, product lines and ads online. 

Reputation provides detailed insights on competitors at both the brand and the location level.

See how you stack up against your competitors with side-by-side dashboards and comparable sentiment analysis data.

Reputation offers impressive AI functionality, you can use their AI to analyze trends and patterns for l your own brand and your competitors’ throughout the entire consumer journey. The Reputation AI then makes recommendations on how you can use these insights going forward.

The reports feature is another great tool for systematizing your data. Use it to turn your findings into easy-to-digest, custom reports, complete with sentiment maps, bar charts and word clouds. 

Customer-centric brands are successful brands. If you want to put customers at the center of your brand, you need to break through silos, centralize your data and share it across teams to guide company-wide strategy.  

As a consumer insights platform built to deliver connected insights through centralized consumer data and AI, Zappi can help you move from disconnected to connected and help you put the customer at the heart of decision making.