It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that competes for our attention these days. And brands seeking to meet their customers’ needs while staying a step ahead of the competition have their hands full, for sure. To that end, the best market intelligence comes from turning over every stone in your market research; and analyzing disparate data sources in one dashboard simplifies this task, while increasing your field of vision.
We’ll look at some of the specifics with a focus on:
- Putting form to unstructured intel
- Analyzing product reviews to understand the voice of the customer
- Leveraging academic research to reveal emerging trends
- Using social intel to gain market intelligence
And here are some stats we encountered that are relevant to the conversation:
- According to research from Gartner, brands drawing insights from consumer feedback experienced cross-selling and upselling success rates increase by 15-20%.
- Companies drilling into consumer data with active VoC programs spend 25% less on customer retention than brands that do not.
- Informing your CX strategy from every available data source is worth the effort as 86% of consumers will shell out more for a great customer experience.
With that, let’s look at the benefits of grabbing intel from sources that others often misinterpret, or worse, ignore. You need it – and Quid Opus has you covered!
Putting Form to Unstructured Intel
Brands can upload any unstructured, text-based dataset using Quid Opus to gain actionable insights that inform decision-makers. And these can be used across a variety of use cases. Here are a few of the most common:
- Voice of the customer (VoC): Offers consumer insight into perceptions of industry, competitors and products or services. Can be used to assess customer pain points, which informs where you need to pivot to meet underlying needs and wants.
- Academic research: Provides valuable intel on innovations taking place within industries and seeing which emerging technologies and capabilities are gaining traction. Also, provides data visualizations that inform on leading institutions and researchers making headway in a particular space.
- Job postings: Useful for gaining understanding into competitor’s recruitment strategies. Enables your brand to establish baselines from which to understand how skillsets and responsibilities for specific teams within an industry change over time.
- Company or product reviews: Explore visualized consumer review data to inform how consumers experience various products, services and brands. Gain insight into how employees feel about their employers.
- Earnings call transcripts: Allows brands a unique window into brands and industries’ health by examining the main themes discussed by executives during earnings calls. Provides valuable intel into what is highlighted, glossed over and ignored. Adding new transcripts when they become available provides insight into how these conversations change over time.
Once you have your data in hand that you want to analyze, it’s as simple as uploading your .csv file into the Quid Opus product to get you on the way to insights that you’d otherwise miss.
And to give you a better idea, we’ll dig into a few examples of use cases below.
Analyzing Product Reviews to Understand the Voice of the Customer
Product reviews are a fantastic resource for brands, especially with the ability to pull them into one dashboard. And this allows you to perform a deep dive for actionable insights into not only your products but those of your competitors as well.
First and foremost, it allows you to visualize the conversation’s scope and see which product attributes are most resonating with consumers. This insight is unavailable with just a cursory look at how many five star reviews the product has. And this depth of market research is also monumentally effective in bolstering your competitive intelligence as well.
For example, here is a network map built from reviews on two competing tennis shoes from Nike and Adidas. After uploading, we’ve renamed the clusters to reflect the dominant attributes mentioned.
And from here, you can use the Quid product functionality you’re familiar with to drill into the data for the insights most important to your brand.
For example, if your brand is trying to make a splash in the in-ear headphones market, then knowing the top keywords mentioned in reviews for Apple’s new Airpod Pros can help your design team build upon what they got right. Here’s a view of what that looks like filtered for four-star reviews and above.
Academic Research Reveals Emerging Trends
Academic research offers a treasure trove of information valuable to brands, but let’s be honest, they’re exhausting to read. And sifting through piles of them is a task that you wouldn’t wish upon your worst enemy. But there are tons of super-valuable data to be had, and the Quid product puts it all at your fingertips.
Uploading academic publications allows you to break down the data to discern industry-specific innovations and emergent technologies gaining steam. Additionally, there’s the added benefit of pinpointing which institutions and researchers are leading the charge in your area of interest.
After running your search in an academic article database, you can then export it and import it into the Quid product using the Opus feature. Quid can sort through thousands of publications in minutes to create a network of visualized data ready to yield its secrets. Here’s what that looks like with 5,000 academic articles on machine learning.
From here, the data can be separated into relevant tags to isolate areas of interest to your brand. After separating for three overarching themes in the general conversation, we discovered that publications centered around healthcare and life science were the majority at 36%.
Of course, this data can continue to be parsed in a myriad of directions. For instance, we found quantum chemistry and clinical decision-making to be the fastest-growing segments in healthcare applications of machine learning.
Sort for the most cited papers on the scatterplot, or filter a bar chart to discover the top universities making moves in your area of interest. It’s all there.
Social Intel is Always on Point
Once you’ve got the hang of all the filters and functionality available in the Quid product, you’ll want to use it to break down everything. And the good news is – you pretty much can. To round out your market intelligence, you can also pull in your social media analyses from the NetBase product into Quid Social to turn up the heat on your social listening.
There’s not even a need to create a .csv file here. Simply start a new search, select ‘social’ from the menu and choose a NetBase topic or your saved analysis for exploration.
Want to do some trend mapping and explore how consumer behaviors have changed post-COVID? Pull your analysis into the dashboard and dig through it for insights as you would any other dataset. The online world is your oyster.
Gaining actionable market intelligence is a never-ending process. And using every available source of disparate data to inform your brand means your market research practices are better than most.
We’ve just covered the tip of the iceberg of intel to be gained from readily available sources. Is your brand getting to the bottom of every resource? As you’ve seen here, there’s no reason not to. Be sure to reach out for a demo, and we’ll help you uncover what the other brands overlook.
