Market research insights have always been central to any product development strategy. It’s never been easier to source information about consumer behaviour and what motivates it. With the help of natural language processing (NLP) tools, you can assess insights from thousands of consumers across multiple channels in a matter of minutes. But how can we extrapolate the most out of this rich data?
In this blog, we’ll cover not only how to easily source and analyse consumer data, but also how to use these insights to inform your product development strategy, and meet the demands, wants and wishes of the market.
Market Insights from Social Media and Review Data
Every day, every minute people are sharing their experiences of products and businesses online via social media and online review sites. This information is publicly available, easy to access and brimming with useful insights – that is, if it is handled and analysed using appropriate methods.
NLP combines linguistics, computer science and AI technology to make sense of unstructured text data wherever it occurs. The Symanto Insights Platform uses NLP to convert this data into useful, measurable insights.
In a matter of minutes, you can analyse a vast number of comments from consumers across any market. Find out about your own customer base and those of your competitors to get a full picture of the market. Discover each of your competitor’s unique selling points (USPs) from the perspective of their customers. Find out which product or service features resonate best with each consumer base. Uncover any gaps in the market and discover how your competitors are performing.
Consumer-Focused Insights for Product Development
People may erroneously believe that the most relevant insights for product development are insights about the products themselves. In reality, it’s at least equally important to get insights about the consumers.
What do consumers want?
TikTok captured the attention of an entire generation. Why? Because of their insight into what Gen Z want from social media. Short-form video is easy to create, it also allows for more creativity than a still image, but the real clincher is every kid’s desire to be an influencer. TikTok’s format and algorithms make it easier for content to go viral. This insight into the motivations of young consumers has revolutionised social media as a whole with Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts quickly following suit to draw some of their userbases back in.
Customer psychographics
Knowing what customers want from your product is one thing, but you can also use insights to understand key personality traits of different customer bases. Are your customers more emotionally or rationally driven? Will they be more compelled by experiential upgrades, or by new functionalities?
Symanto’s NLP algorithms detect the personality traits and preferred communication styles of consumers based on how they write.
You may be surprised to learn that who you deemed to be your main competitor attracts customers with very different personality profiles.
See the big picture, then hone in on granular insights
The Symanto Insights Platform uses interactive data visualisations to help you navigate your data from a high level right down to a granular understanding of consumer drivers. The Symanto Insights Platform identifies topics and subtopics within comments, and groups them together so that you can read all related comments in context. This enables you to get a more holistic picture of each topic and different perspectives.
Involve other departments
Ensure that your research team has representation from other departments. Involving your marketing, design and engineering personnel right from the start will help them get a deeper understanding of the end-user as opposed to just viewing presentations and reports. First-hand participation in the research will make it more likely that the insights will influence their work.
When presenting your findings to your executive audience, you need the information to be as compelling as possible. One method is to present findings through human stories, create buyer profiles, and show how your product fits into their lives.
Involving and engaging different teams helps you get different perspectives. Employ your creative talent to join together different insights, trends and perspectives and generate novel ideas.
Use Insights to Springboard Innovation
Remember the point of the exercise: product development. Gaining insights is just the start of the story. You need to act on them. Make sure that you have support from executives, and that other departments are on board with your vision of the end-user to maximise the effectiveness through product design, development and rollout.
Get Started With The Symanto Insights Platform
The Symanto Insights Platform incorporates NLP technologies to give you powerful insights into your products and services from the perspective of your customers.
Symanto creates customised solutions to help you get the most out of online data. To get started, get in touch or book your free personalised demonstration today.
