Do you know your audience? Or do you just think you know your audience?

Nowadays, you can’t rely on guesswork and intuition to drive growth. You need to know exactly who your audience is, what they want, how they make decisions, and what might keep them from picking you.

All of those factors add up to buyer insights—and they’re a powerful tool to inform your product development, enhance your marketing strategy, and enhance the overall customer experience. After all, if you know your customers, they’ll know you, too.

In this blog, we’ll cover what buyer insights are and why they matter, how to gather buyer insights, tips for developing a growth-driven strategy, and the role leadership plays in maximizing the value of your buyer insights.

The What and Why Behind Buyer Insights

Buyer insights are deep, actionable understandings derived from analyzing customer data and behavior. These insights look at patterns, preferences, and motivations that shape how customers interact with a brand. 

Here are some common questions these insights will answer for you:

• What triggers your buyers to look for a solution initially? 
• What do your buyers expect out of your solution, and what problem must your solution ultimately solve?
• What might stand in the way of your buyers choosing you?
• What are your buyers’ “must-haves” in a product or solution?
• How do your buyers decide when and how they pick a vendor?

Getting detailed answers to each of these questions can help you accomplish all sorts of things. First, you can make informed product-developing decisions that align with customer needs and preferences. Similarly, the insights you gather could help you find gaps in the market that your buyers are hoping to fill, so you can become more innovative as a result.

Next, understanding what resonates with your customers allows for more targeted and effective marketing. And the better you can speak with your audience, the better your customers’ opinion of you. Tailoring interactions based on insights fosters a more memorable, delightful experience. 

Clearly, these insights matter. But how do you get them?

Related: Better Insights, Better Decisions: The Power of Buyer Interviews

Buyer Interviews Are Your “In”

There are multiple ways to get customer insights. You can gather data through surveys, purchase history, web analytics, and social media and use data analysis tools to decode patterns and trends. 

Advanced analytics tools like CRM systems, data visualization software, and machine learning algorithms can help in deriving meaningful insights from complex datasets. Techniques such as segmentation, cohort analysis, and predictive analytics are also useful.

But if you’re looking to get specific, you need to narrow in on buyer interviews. Buyer interviews are exactly what they sound like. It’s an investigative technique that helps you know exactly how your customers and potential buyers make important decisions—and they often reveal things you might be getting wrong about those folks.

And here’s the cool part: You don’t have to do them yourself. One of our fractional CMOs can conduct the interviews for you, build a detailed report just for you, and help you develop a strategy using those insights. 

Here’s a link to a sample buyer interview report if you’re curious! 

Related: Don’t Guess How Customers Decide: Do Buyer Interviews

Using Insights to Drive Growth

For buyer insights to drive business growth, they must be aligned with organizational goals. This involves crafting data-driven strategies that reflect customer preferences and market demands and examining successful businesses that have effectively applied buyer insights for valuable lessons and inspiration.

We’ve mentioned product development several times, but here’s how that works in practice. You examine customer feedback and suggestions, identify what’s viable and most profitable for your business, implement the most important changes first, and iterate on that development for ongoing improvements and refinements.

You can also use insights to start changing the way you communicate with your buyers. We know from practice how much words matter, and buyers often have widely different perceptions based on the way a company communicates with them. Buyer insights can help you personalize interactions, provide better, more responsive customer service, and create loyalty programs and experiences that resonate with customer values and preferences.

Next, let’s look at a big topic: sales. Insights are huge profit drivers, helping you refine your sales approaches based on customer behavior and preferences. By knowing what your buyers want, you can offer relevant products and services—and position them appropriately. Each of these improvements ultimately drives higher conversion rates.

But what about customers you already have? Buyer interviews can also be used to identify churn signals, such as reduced engagement or declining satisfaction. From there, you can quickly develop targeted retention strategies, such as personalized offers and proactive support, to help keep customers engaged.

And as valuable as these insights are, you need to be ready to respond to your customers’ needs quickly—and that’s hard to do with minimal resources. Thankfully, the right leadership can help steer you right.

Related: Discover the Why Behind the Buy with Buyer Interviews

Ready to Really Get to Know Your Audience?

If you’re looking to harness the full potential of buyer insights, working with a fractional CMO can help you gather that intel, decide what’s most important, build and execute an effective marketing strategy that uses those insights, and ultimately, help you make more deals.

And unlike hiring a full-time CMO, you only pay partial costs—while getting the full, integrated experience you’d expect out of a traditional marketing executive. 

Let’s help you get there. Click here, and we’ll be in touch to set up a quick, no-obligation call with one of our leaders.