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What is an insight? It’s a good question, especially since almost every marketing expert understands the need for such a tool. Insights highlight think and feel factors, outline audience nuances, and ultimately create unique marketing opportunities.
But what, exactly, is an insight? And, more importantly, how do insights impact marketing That’s what I wanted to explore today.
Knowing how to do market research and identify insights is one of the most vital parts of the marketing process. As a market research partner for marketers, I’ve encountered some incredible market research insights that have impacted some truly incredible campaigns. That’s why I wanted to cover this important topic!
The most amazing marketing in history has always come from these incredible, intangible, innovative little ingots called insights, yet very few marketers truly know what they are or how to leverage them.
Let’s define it
Oxford (by way of Google) gives us “the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing,” as the definition, and honestly, that’s a pretty solid description. A deep, intuitive understanding of an audience is exactly what we’re looking for when we set out to apply insights to marketing.
Deep information about an audience might be their advanced buying habits, or the core values they believe in that align with your brand. They might be habits and rituals that majority of an audience, or even a valuable subset, exhibit, and that you can use to create more meaningful messaging or more strategic campaign tactics.
‘Insight’ is the word we use to define this kind of insider knowledge about a market.
Make your marketing insightful
To be insightful is the goal of almost every marketing strategy. Insightful marketing takes into account the audiences habits, beliefs and values, and helps marketers insert their messaging into those worlds in effective ways.
An insightful advertising campaign isn’t one that blasts a generic message, but targets audiences strategically with specific messaging that resonates with them.
An insightful digital campaign is one that shares multiple messages over time, in such a way that it walks the audience down a path, from awareness, to interest, to engagement, to conversion.
An insightful strategy takes into account where the customer is in the buying process and how that customer likes to make their purchase decisions. Insightful marketing is strategic, because it seamlessly works its way into the audience’s lives.
Insights are advanced knowledge
Insights often come from an accumulation of knowledge, and for many marketers that knowledge comes from experience over years. This is why so many great marketers thrive within one vertical – becoming superstars of hotel marketing, food and beverage marketing, sports marketing, etc. – without ever setting foot in another arena. They gain experience over time, insider knowledge about their audiences and how their industries operate, and they leverage that knowledge, their insights, into effective marketing strategies
So, what do you do when you aren’t an industry expert but need industry insights to make your campaign truly kick ass? That’s where market research comes in.
Insights are the output of research
Market research produces insights. Great market research produces great insights.
Market research is the process of understanding markets. It’s combining data and information, analyzing, and ultimately extracting the nuggets of truth that can make your marketing outstanding. It’s those nuggets that S2 Research refers to as insights. We understand it’s not just about delivering facts, but delivering turn-key thoughts for marketers.
Producing usable insights is the challenge for market researchers
There’s really two groups of folks who conduct research: market researchers, and marketers doing their own research. But the challenge for both is to produce usable insights.
When it comes to market researchers, most operate on the ‘more is better’ philosophy. They deliver multi-page documents spanning audiences and information. They include stats and figures and long-form analyses that can best be described as ‘complex.’
Marketers, meanwhile, often gather all the information they can, and analyze it themselves. They pull public data and insightful articles, and read and dissect until they feel they know the audience.
What both groups struggle with, unfortunately, is in the deliverable. More is not more when it comes to research outputs. In fact, less is most often more. Marketers don’t need market research to create great marketing; they need boiled down insights. They don’t need the 20-page report, they need the three bullet list at the end that summarizes what it all means.
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Research is like copywriting
I love great copywriting. From ads to articles, great use of language in marketing is outstanding.
To do great copywriting, you need to boil your message into the smallest, most meaningful iteration possible. This is how you turn a full-page creative brief into a shortened-down headline that resonates. It’s about boiling the message until it’s at its purest, most memorable format.
Copywriting is a lot like research in this way. Grabbing as much information as possible is important, but the end result still needs to be that boiled down, impactful message that resonates with your audience. In this case, your audience is marketers, and your message is an insight.
Boil it down and deliver something amazing
How does one boil down research into insights? It’s about combining cutting.
I’ve seen many researchers deliver a ten-year analysis of trend data, when the actual insight is the market opportunity for the future. That level of detail rarely resonates with tactic-based marketers, as the nugget of truth doesn’t obviously come across in that format.
Instead, think like a copywriter.
If the goal is the show the market opportunity, the insight should predominantly highlight the market opportunity. It should also expand on how it can be formulated into marketing, in order to get the gears spinning for your audience’s execution. Remember, the focus is on delivering the nugget, not the backup.
Think like a marketer
To turn research into insights, you need to think like a marketer.
As you boil down your information, ask yourself, what matters most to a marketer? Is it the opportunity that the data presents? Is it the core message that will resonate with the audience?
Fine-tune your data into what will impact the mind of the marketer, and you’ll have the basis for your insight.
What is an insight?
For marketing, an insight is a nugget of truth that creates a marketing opportunity. More-so, an insight is the actionable result of great market research.
To have great marketing, you need great insights. You need the deep dive of information that highlights how your audience thinks, and what will move them to action. When insights are incorporated into your marketing strategy, you can be sure you’re marketing with sniper-like precision, as opposed to just throwing spaghetti at the wall.
