Today’s consumers are accustomed to finding the exact information they need about a product or service online. As they search, comment, and engage with others, a trail of digital breadcrumbs forms, allowing brands to catch a glimpse into the actual wants, needs, and desires of potential users and existing customers alike.
Digital Consumer Intelligence (DCI) is the process of collecting, aggregating, and analyzing publicly available data from sources across the web, including search, comment, blog, social media, forums, reviews, and news, just to name a few. More social science than market research, DCI is a fast, accurate way to gauge consumer sentiment than traditional methods. When we ask the right questions, what we find is tremendously telling.
For organizations looking for answers, DCI gives businesses access to quantifiable insights to inform their product, marketing, and operations strategies. By leveraging historical queries and expressed interest data from platforms like Google, YouTube, Amazon, Pinterest, and Reddit, among others, we can uncover new and evolving trends, gauge dips and spikes in the market, and give your organization a leading edge.
New opportunities don’t just land in our laps. We must seek them with a keen eye on the state of the market. Whether you’ve already identified your product or service or are in the exploratory phase, an exploratory DCI initiative can give you the necessary information before making a substantial investment.
Digital consumer intelligence accelerates the vetting process because much of the data we need to answer questions like, “Are people looking for your solution?” and “Is it competitive?” are already out there. DCI turns anecdotal evidence and preliminary theories into hard evidence. Evidence you can use to develop product features, prioritize your launch strategy, and secure funding.
Ahead of your next new venture, obtain the foundational intelligence you need by launching your preliminary DCI investigation early. Identify new product lines, discover where your potential customers spend their time and begin your engagement strategy. Gather data on customer sentiment in adjacent industries, isolate pain points, and explore the features your potential competitors aren’t hitting to learn from their mistakes.
Your DCI project has helped you identify the problems your product could solve. It’s helped you validate need and calculate your total addressable market (TAM). Now, it’s time to harness the power of DCI to iron out the selling points and features customers are most interested in.
In today’s fast-paced, digital environment, consumers are more than willing to express the honest truth about their product grievances on the internet. Believe it or not, this is excellent news.
As platforms grow and evolve, comment sections, message boards, and reviews have grown increasingly important to consumers. Digital critiques are fueling purchasing like never before. Using explicit search data, trends, and expressed interests from sources across the internet, we can help you prioritize your product roadmap, validate the most important features to users, and align that with what is most profitable for the business. Avoid failed product launches and lackluster results by addressing potential problems before they occur. DCI initiative saves your product teams time and money.
Like product planning, strategic content and programming planning using DCI is a fast, accurate way to gauge consumer sentiment. Opinions shift quickly, so streaming platforms and publishers would be well served to monitor public opinion across touch points regularly.
Users aren’t shy about telling us what they hated about a show or how it is taking too long for the next season’s return. If you know what to look for – we can help you with that – your organization can fill the gaps left by first-party data with sentiment analysis that amplifies your strategic content plan and accelerates results.
From HR to finance, DCI can give your organization a high-level view of the competitor landscape. Every press release, tweet, and LinkedIn post your competitors create gives us an additional data point to explore. Digital consumer intelligence opens the door to new opportunities to measure the effectiveness of competitor strategies and reverse engineer why they worked. When aggregating the data we’ve collected, we often identify the fruits of new marketing investments or unexpected bursts in brand awareness and report those before your market share begins to erode.
When it comes to comparative analysis, DCI is often the fastest path to insights. Online, opinions can shift abruptly. If you’re having trouble identifying why a competitor has a hold on the market, a DCI initiative can give you the information you need to break through that barrier with fast insights to fuel your next brand campaign.
Is your organization adequately staffed? Do you have an accurate view of your current market share? Are you missing opportunities without even knowing? These are all questions DCI can answer. Digital consumer intelligence gives you a fresh perspective, providing the information you need to assess your team’s performance outside your internal metrics. Know when your staffing is competitive, and when it isn’t, identify where you can output the most value so you can compete with fewer resources.
Nearly every aspect of your business, from HR, to sales, marketing, and especially customer service, can benefit from good DCI. If users regularly complain about a certain aspect of a business in their tweets, it might indicate that you or your competitors have staffing issues. It also might mean that your industry is struggling in a given area. We can determine which is true. You can identify if a specific geolocation is struggling or if your competitors are dominating the market in Denver but struggling in Dallas. DCI provides the advanced insight businesses need to accelerate momentum and get ahead.
Digital customer intelligence is one of a sales team's most powerful tools. Aside from the obvious outline of selling points that resonate with customers, DCI can provide up-to-date persona research and identify opposition points so sales teams are prepared to leverage the right tools to make the sale.
Your organization may be in need of strategic content that sales teams could provide to boost customer confidence. Help your teams anticipate customer needs before their first engagement. DCI helps keep your sales playbook up to date, giving your staff the preparation they need to support customers and close more deals.
Measuring problem/solution awareness is costly and takes tremendous effort. Supplement your internal metrics with broad sentiment analysis with a robust digital consumer intelligence strategy. If your customer service (CS) is lacking, it’s almost certain people are talking about it online. Venting online is one of the most common ways customers react when they have a less-than-savory experience with customer service agents. Through targeted DCI initiatives, you will not only identify what pain points people are hitting and where, but you can also quantify how that affects public opinion. The good news is that if your customer service is excellent, they will be singing your praises on message boards and comments too.
The expressed opinions and experiences of your customers reveal more than just sentiment. Customers are creative in how they work around your systems; those methods aren’t always apparent to internal teams. If your customers are talking about it online, we'll see it. You might find that your CS staffing is undeserving customers during a particular time or that your competitors have doubled the size of their CS department. It pays to listen. From staffing to competitor analysis, good DCI gives your CS teams the right information to boost customer satisfaction and maintain a competitive edge.
At Gray Dot Company, we empower organizations with the business intelligence they need to make accurate decisions faster than ever before. Our digital consumer intelligence experts are poised to help your teams execute successful product launches, validate your internal efforts, and stay competitive under dynamic market conditions.
Market Intelligence is more imperative to business than ever before. Your business can align your product portfolio and content using search data to pinpoint market interest and support strategic planning. DCI projects reveal surprising new perspectives using novel data, revealing insights traditional market research can’t.
Discover the power of DCI: Contact an Expert Today
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