AI + Consumer Insights: A Time Saving Guide

In this guide we’ll show how AI-powered technology can help make quick work of

• Understanding brand perception
• Analyzing campaign performance
• Identifying relevant trends within an industry

Brand perception

It’s challenging to find time for deep consumer research, especially for a small team.

The process of creating a detailed survey or questionnaire and finding suitable respondents is arduous. Focus groups can be both time and resource-costly. And bringing in an external market research firm could mean waiting months for meaningful insights. That said, it’s more important than ever for brands of all sizes to understand consumer preferences and opinions if they want to drive revenue.

Luckily, advancements in AI have made it possible for marketing teams of all sizes to quickly uncover consumer insights that used to require a full team of analysts to find.

Now, any marketer can use AI technology to sweep through swathes of online data to instantly answer questions like:

• How do consumers view our brand today?
• What are the emerging trends in our industry?
• Was our marketing campaign a success?

Simple set up can help track everything from the volume of conversation about your brand, to the sentiment and emotion around products. You can also easily track major topics without having to manually scan through dozens of posts, and be notified about major changes in a conversation so that crises and opportunities can be handled early.

Campaign performance

Traditionally, questions around how a campaign is performing weren’t easy to answer. They would require the same focus groups and surveys we’ve already discussed, and you’d need to do them for every campaign. Luckily there are now easier and much quicker ways to make sense of your campaign’s overall success. This needn’t be left til after a campaign is over – AI and continuous monitoring make it simple to jump into a dashboard and check on key performance indicators at any time.

Marketers can easily use AI to instantly answer questions like:

• What impact is our campaign having on brand conversation volume?
• How is our campaign impacting brand perception?
• Is our campaign resonating with our target audience?

Here’s an example from Squarespace, a relatively small company that often does big campaigns around the Super Bowl. In 2018, they aired an ad featuring a voiceover by Keanu Reeves and footage of him performing a stunt on a motorcycle.

Here’s an example of how brand mentions and sentiment can be measured over the long term – but you can get far more granular – even down to the minute!

Consumer trend analysis

While brand perception and campaign performance are usually the go-to use cases when analyzing consumer opinion, some of the most powerful insights come from analyzing larger consumer trends and preferences. This type of larger-scale consumer analysis is something that time-poor teams may feel they don’t have the time for, but with the help of AI and trillions of data points from online conversation, deep market research and consumer insights are within the reach of any marketing team.

Understanding the trends that drive consumer purchasing decisions will help your brand stay ahead of the competition and boost sales, and there are all kinds of research questions to start out with.

• How has conversation about a topic changed over time?
• How are consumers talking about new brands and products in my industry?
• What new trends in my industry are being discussed by my audience?

For example, brands can look at rapid rise and fall of conversation about wearable smart devices.

Or at how different dietary preferences are spoken about over time.

You don’t necessarily need to be conscious of a trend in order to track it, either. With AI, big topics that emerge will be automatically identified so you can stay alert to new trends at all times.