The marketer’s guide to choosing a consumer insights platform

What do your customers want today? What will they want next year? Which new ad concept will be a winner with a new audience segment? 

These are the types of questions consumer insights tools can help you answer. Without them, you’re whiteboarding and brainstorming with minimal data and hoping you get it right. With the right tools, you can have actionable data around customer preferences and can predict behavior to create winning products and campaigns.

“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.”

– Tom Fishburne

In this article, I’ll cover what consumer insights platforms can do for your business, why they’re important and a list of top options to choose from.

A consumer insights platform is the modern way to collect, analyze and interpret consumer data. Consumer insights tools pull consumer data from various sources and provide valuable insights that help guide you as a marketer to smarter business decisions. 

For example, consumer insights tools can identify patterns in consumer behavior. What do they buy, how often do they visit your website, and what do they do while there? The right tools can help you segment your audiences so you deliver more personalized offers to surprise and delight your customers! 

A Salesforce report said, “73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.” Since you’re not a mind reader, you need the right tools. 

In a world where 95% of new products fail, accessing consumer insights tools can make the difference between launching a successful product or wasting millions on product innovation and launches that fall flat.

In recent years, we’ve witnessed the failure of Google Glass, Google Stadia and Jucierio Juice Press. There are many reasons for these flops, and for giants like Google and Amazon, it’s the price of doing business. They can afford lavish experiments. But for most companies, failing to launch a profitable product can mean closing the doors – especially if it’s their only product. According to MIT says, “92% of startups fold in their first three years for that same reason.”

Fortunately, a consumer insights platform allows you to test and iterate at every step, from concept to messaging, all the way to final design. Such a platform improves the potential for successful product innovation and customer retention and optimizes ad spending so you stay current with your customers' interests. 

“Innovation needs to be part of your culture. Consumers are transforming faster than we are, and if we don’t catch up, we’re in trouble.”

– Ian Schafer 

As you consider the hundreds of consumer insights tools, you probably have questions. Let’s dive into some key considerations.

Choosing the right consumer insights tools for researchers starts with your business goals. Are you looking to test new ideas for innovative products, or do you want to optimize existing campaigns with connected insights? 

Whatever goals you define, those goals offer useful guardrails for assessing available consumer insights tools. 

Here are some criteria to consider:

Data sources and integration 

No matter where you source your data, you want to ensure it integrates with your existing tech stack. Many tools integrate with multiple CRMs, analytics, and other tools, but it’s a good idea to double-check that yours will work. 

Additionally, make sure it consolidates data from multiple sources, including your website, CRM, and third-party sources like survey tools or paid media. 

When your tech stack is well integrated, you get a better-rounded view of your customers.

Ease of use 

Some tools are intuitive, and others have a steep learning curve. As cross-departmental data access expectations continue, choose tools everyone can access and use.

When you have the right tools, no one needs to Slack the data team for a metric or clarification because they can grab what they need with the necessary context, which makes for powerful collaborations.

AI and actionable insights 

AI tools for consumer insights can provide sentiment analysis and predictive modeling for actionable insights. For example, some AI tools can parse large amounts of data, summarize and categorize it for you. This makes it easier to spot patterns in your customer base to assess their preferences better.

Real-time vs historical data 

The most successful brands track customer behavior and sentiment in real-time and compare it to historical data. This helps you spot customer behavior changes and form hypotheses for future behavior you can test. 

“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, Senior Manager, US Menu Insights, McDonald’s

Compliance and data privacy 

Your customers’ privacy is important, so you want to use consumer insight tools that comply with GDPR, CCPA and other relevant data protection laws. 

These criteria can guide your assessment of the right consumer insights tools for researchers for your brand. Now let’s jump into the top ten consumer insights tools. 

There are dozens of consumer insight tools to deliver a slice of data, from insights into their preferences to how they’re talking about you on social to how many visits your site is getting and more. That’s why you want multiple research methods to build a 3D image of your customer.

Here are our picks for the top ten types of customer research tools. 

1. Website analytics

Let’s start with the foundation. Website analytics tools like Google Analytics deliver the necessary data to gauge your site performance. How do your visitors find you, what pages do they visit, and how long do they stay? You can see traffic spikes or drop offs and try to identify the reasons behind them. 

Web analytics are a good place to benchmark your website’s performance and identify your most visited pages. You can spot potential content gaps and develop plans to optimize your best-performing pages. 

2. Trend trackers

Consumer interests can shift like the wind, but regular check-ins with a tool like Google Trends can help you identify shifting behaviors. Used by newsrooms and researchers worldwide, Google Trends shares up-to-the-minute keyword searches compared to total search volume. 

3. Heat mapping tools 

When you can track your visitor’s eyes and see where they linger, you have more insight into the most attention-grabbing locations on your site. That may lead you to questions such as, should you move a button or a call to action to be more prominent?  

Hotjar is one such consumer insights tool that gets rave reviews from users such as this one. 

4. Customer surveys

Nothing beats talking to your customers. Customer surveys are one efficient way to find out what your customers want. 

You’ve probably filled out many surveys over the years. Take the restaurant that leaves a multiple-choice form with the bill. They want to know if you liked the food, service and ambiance. 

Online surveys are simple to set up, so it’s not surprising they’re so popular. 

This article on Backlinko reports “Online surveys rank as the most used quantitative method among market research professionals with 85% of respondents who say they use this method regularly.”

However, customer surveys work best when you’re intentional about selecting your respondents and the questions you ask. 

As Kate Schardt, Sr Director of Global Insights at PepsiCo puts it, “You can't make a meta analysis of Swiss cheese data. You can't have a standard in terms of what is effective advertising [or innovation], if you have everyone choosing their own adventure in terms of who they want to talk to. That doesn't fit with How Brands Grow science. You have to have consistency and you need to talk to a relatively broad sample.”

5. Survey panels 

If customer surveys are helpful, imagine having the chance to go deeper with your customers or potential customers through survey panels. With well-selected panelists, you can ask about anything from flavor to color preferences and more. 

Some brands also use survey panels for feedback on potential concepts or product innovations. 

Survey panels like those in Zappi’s platform offer powerful consumer insights tools for researchers and marketers. The process involves iterative testing to discern your customers' motivations, behaviors and preferences for bigger and better ads or products.

6. Social media listening 

In today’s 24-hour world, it’s essential to stay abreast of social media mentions. Not only does monitoring social media channels keep you aware of what people are saying about your brand, but if there are any problems, you can address them immediately. 

Additionally, real-time monitoring detects customer sentiment underlying the comments.

Think of customer sentiment as a “vibe check.” Are your customers loving your product(s)? Or is there a shift over time? The faster you can pick up on the shifting winds of your customer base, the quicker you can address changing tastes and stay current. 

Brandwatch, Hootsuite and Meltwatrer are all tools that can help you stay current with your customers. 

7. NPS score 

The Net Promoter Score or NPS uses one question to determine the customer’s happiness. 

Respondents answer from 0-10, using 9 and 10 as promoters and 0-6 as detractors. You use the following formula: 

NPS = % of Promoters ( — ) % of Detractors 

The answer determines if your brand has a greater number of promoters or detractors. Plus, you can reward your promoters with a discount, an opportunity to win a prize, or some other gift. 

8. Usability studies (UX) 

No one wants to lose money because people are confused. Improving your site or app’s usability improves conversions, customer satisfaction and fewer support tickets. 

According to Bain & Company, “by increasing retention by as little as 5 percent, profits can be boosted by as much as 95 percent.” By tracking your user's onsite behavior, you can monitor clicks, user journeys and time spent on specific pages and tasks. UX studies give clues for ways to improve the consumer experience so they stick around. 

9. Competitive intelligence 

Smart brands pay attention to their competitors. It’s useful for benchmarking market position, spotting gaps, and staying current with trends so they can shift strategy as needed. 

Tools like Similarweb analyze competitor website traffic and specific keywords so you can assess audience behavior. 

10. AI tools

No list of consumer insights tools would be complete without AI. Zappi’s AI Marketing Agents use AI to generate summaries of ad performance or help you create products that fill a gap in your customer bases. These summaries provide details on specific KPIs and areas for improvement, so you know what to focus on to optimize your campaign. 

Here’s an example of the type of performance summary you can get on an ad concept: 

Alternatively, here’s the type of feedback you can expect to receive when exploring innovation opportunities for Gen Z for instance:

When you receive ongoing and actionable consumer insights like these with the help of AI, you can make smarter and faster decisions to help you win with consumers

Now that you know what to consider in your consumer insights tools, you’re well-prepared to choose the consumer insights platforms that meets your business goals. 

With the right platforms, omnichannel marketing becomes a natural extension of your brand, allowing you to connect with your customers in a natural and friendly way so you feel less like an interruption and more a part of their ecosystem.