How can you gain customer insights for your creative strategy?

1 Use customer research methods

One of the most common and reliable ways to gain customer insights is to use customer research methods, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation, ethnography, or user testing. These methods allow you to collect quantitative and qualitative data from your customers, such as their demographics, psychographics, feedback, opinions, emotions, needs, goals, challenges, and behaviors. You can use customer research methods to validate your assumptions, identify your customer segments and personas, understand your customer journey and touchpoints, measure your customer satisfaction and loyalty, and discover new opportunities and ideas for improvement.

2 Analyze customer data

Another way to gain customer insights is to analyze customer data, which are the information and metrics that you collect from your customers' interactions with your business, such as their purchases, transactions, browsing history, online behavior, social media activity, reviews, ratings, referrals, or complaints. You can use customer data to track and measure your customer performance, such as their retention, churn, lifetime value, conversion, or advocacy. You can also use customer data to segment your customers based on their characteristics, behavior, or value, and to personalize your communication and offers to them.

3 Apply customer insight frameworks

A third way to gain customer insights is to apply customer insight frameworks, which are the tools and models that help you organize and analyze your customer research and data, and generate actionable and meaningful insights. Some of the popular customer insight frameworks are the empathy map, the value proposition canvas, the jobs to be done theory, the customer experience map, the SWOT analysis, or the 5 whys technique. These frameworks help you to empathize with your customers, define their problems and solutions, understand their motivations and outcomes, map their experiences and emotions, assess your strengths and weaknesses, and uncover the root causes of their issues.

4 Involve your customers in co-creation

A fourth way to gain customer insights is to involve your customers in co-creation, which is the process of collaborating with your customers to design and develop new or improved products, services, or experiences that meet their needs and expectations. You can involve your customers in co-creation by inviting them to participate in ideation sessions, workshops, hackathons, prototyping, testing, or feedback loops. Co-creation can help you to gain customer insights by tapping into their creativity, knowledge, and perspectives, and by building trust and loyalty with them.

5 Learn from your competitors and industry trends

A fifth way to gain customer insights is to learn from your competitors and industry trends, which are the external factors that influence your customers' preferences, expectations, and behaviors. You can learn from your competitors and industry trends by conducting a competitive analysis, a market research, a trend analysis, or a benchmarking. These methods can help you to gain customer insights by identifying your competitive advantages and disadvantages, understanding your market size and potential, spotting emerging opportunities and threats, and comparing your performance and practices with the best in your industry.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?