Best practices for gathering consumer insights in the CPG industry

Both multi-national corporations with hundreds of brands and thousands of products or a small home-grown business serving a local community—if you want to stand out from your competition and meet your customers’ evolving needs, you must understand your customer well. And the best way to understand your customer is by learning how to gather consumer insights, quickly and efficiently.

Why it’s important to gather consumer insights in the CPG & FMCG industry 

Consumer insights help CPG and FMCG enterprises understand how customers think and feel about your brands and products, how your customers behave, and what your customers’ needs are, so you can stay on the pulse of your CX and make swift decisions to improve the customer journey and, therefore, your bottom line.

In fact, McKinsey reports that “organizations that leverage customer behavioral insights outperform peers by 85 percent in sales growth and more than 25 percent in gross margin.”

The problem is, many enterprises are stuck leveraging only a fraction of the data available to them because of rapid data growth, inefficient legacy data management systems, and siloed databases.

Here, we talk about three ways to gather consumer insights and how you can gain an advantage by having all your sources of customer insights in one, searchable place.

Here’s how to find consumer insights in the CPG industry 

When you gather customer data, you can transform it into knowledge and insights that help you make better business decisions to improve your customer experience and help you stand out from your competition.

Here are three ways you can collect consumer insights in the CPG and FMCG sector:

Ask your customers what they think.

• Feedback questionnaires and surveys can give your CPG/FMCG company insight into how your brand, product, or service is performing. With questionnaires, you can ask pointed questions and gather qualitative data on specific topics that will help you understand your customer needs on a granular level.

• Online reviews are a great resource for gathering customer insights to understand and anticipate customer needs and any shifting customer sentiments about your brand or products, so you can make impactful recommendations to the decision makers in your company.
  
• Customer sentiment surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) ratings are quick ways to get an idea of how your customers feel about your brands. Transform that feedback into customer insights, and you’ve got what it takes to make quick, quality decisions that lock-in customer loyalty.

Collect behavioral data.

• Behavioral data is a goldmine if you want to optimize your customers’ online experience and customer journey. From Google Analytics to heat mapping and screen recording, it’s like being a fly on the wall while your customer walks through your virtual store. With behavioral data, you can identify barriers to conversions and make clear, confident decisions that make immediate business impact.

• A/B testing is another great way to test your customers’ online experience and see what kind of messaging resonates most with them when comes to your buying your products. When it comes to A/B (or split) testing, the proof is in the pudding. Your behavioral data will quickly tell you what works better between two different options.

Track brand-related conversations on social media platforms.

• If you use social listening tools to monitor and analyze mentions of your brands and products on certain social media channels, you’re ahead of the game. Social listening is a great way to understand what your customers think about your brands and products by tracking what’s said about your company on relevant social channels. It’s another rich place for customer insights that can inform targeted decision-making across the entire customer journey.

What happens next?

It’s clear that there are many ways to stay on top of consumer trends. But once you gather these insights, what do you do with them? If you’re an insights manager in a large CPG or FMCG enterprise, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the tools and methods for finding and gathering customer insights. A large organization like yours will typically manage huge amounts of internal and external data (about many different products, brands, and segments) from many different sources.

As insights pros from Kellogg’s understand all too well, all those sources of knowledge can get complicated, fast.

That’s why Market Logic Software created an insights platform that breaks down data silos, integrates hundreds of customer insights sources, and brings all your in-house intelligence into one, searchable platform for you to capture all your data and knowledge.

If you want to get the most value out of your consumer insights data, there’s no better way than collecting all your sources of customer insights into one, searchable place, so you can identify valuable patterns and connections.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can gather customer data and transform it into customer insights for smart business decisions across your entire CPG/FMCG business, request a demo with our team.