The best ways to use customer insight to improve your campaign ROI

As an agency, you’re always looking to demonstrate the value you provide to clients. It’s how you build long-term relationships and maximise retention (which is something we talked about in a recent blog post on client retention for agencies).

When you’re constantly pushing the boundaries of success, clients know they have a trusted partner that’s focused on generating results, results, and more results.

So, with a value-hungry client breathing down your neck, how do you stay ahead of the curve and keep that ROI graph pointing towards the sky?

Your secret weapon for campaign success

As marketers, we’re constantly told to “know the customer”. But if you’re going to deliver campaigns that really make a difference for your clients, you need a secret sauce. Something that helps you engage with your clients’ customers on another level.

That secret sauce isn’t so secret, really. It’s just good old fashioned customer insight. The sort of insight that tells you the best ways to get those prospects’ attention – and hold it for as long as you need to.

What is customer insight?

Customer insight is all about understanding human behaviour – and more specifically for marketing, understand what customers need and want in their day-to-day lives.

According to Trustpilot, customer insight should improve the way businesses communicate with customers, with the ultimate aim of influencing their behaviour and improving sales.

We’ve written loads of articles on the best ways to gather valuable customer insights.

But what do you do with the insights once you’ve got them? How can you make the most of the data you’ve gathered for the benefit of your clients – and ultimately, the growth of your agency?

3 ways customer insight improves campaign performance

1. Messaging optimisation

Clients may think they know what their customers need to hear. They may be talking about the features of their product that they think are most compelling, for example. Or the issues that they think are a priority for customers during their buying journey. But actually, when you gather insights, it can reveal hidden things that matter more.

For example, a software firm we worked with had built a series of key messages around the notion that the software was designed by end-users for other end users. When we reviewed the insights – including speech analytics from phone conversations – we found that message didn’t resonate as well as some other factors. Their agency were able to advise the client to change their messaging strategy and as a result, saw a huge uplift in campaign engagement and enquiries.

2. Content strategy

As an agency tasked with helping clients generate leads and sales, you’ll know that a high-performing content strategy is key in today’s digital world. The types of content you create, the themes and topics you focus on, and the channels through which you promote it all, need to be optimised as much as possible for best results. The insights you can gather through marketing analytics tools can help with this.

Take call tracking and marketing attribution software, for example. With this, you can build a complete picture of the customer journey. You can see the channels that drive the most phone calls into the client’s business. You can even listen to real-world conversations to understand the questions and challenges they face. This insight can feed straight into your content strategy recommendations for clients.

What’s more, with tools like Mediahawk you can track and report on the success of your efforts, including any phone conversions that come in off the back of your content.

3. Paid ad performance

If you’re running pay-per-click (PPC) ads for clients, there’s a whole world of insight you can bring to the table to improve your campaigns. Optimising paid ads is a delicate business. So you’ll want to gather as much insight on what works best, helping you optimise campaigns as much as possible.

For instance, do you know the impact phone leads could be having on campaign ROI? Do your clients know this too? With insights from tools such as Mediahawk’s keyword call tracking feature, you can make sure phone leads are included in your reports, giving a much more accurate view of how your campaigns are performing. You’ll be able to attribute inbound calls to individual PPC keywords and make smarter decisions about your ads budget.

So there you have it: three ways you can take your carefully gathered customer insights and turn them into real value for your clients. And if you’re constantly gathering insights and feeding them into your campaign planning, your recommendations and decisions will be refined over time. It means you’ll always be basing your decision making on the very latest behaviours and trends.