On the surface, self-service audience insights can seem a real turn-off for corporate companies. Why bother with audience tools when you’ve got a trusty analytics team, first-party data, consultancy hours, and supporting agencies all on hand?

By all means, this is a valuable pool of insight that businesses should always make the most of. But these resources share one problem: they eat up your time.

That’s where self-service insights truly prove their value.

1. Make faster decisions 

The post-pandemic business landscape continues to shift rapidly. As data analysts are under increasing pressure to deliver insights for multiple projects at once, bottlenecking is a common corporate problem that slows down decision-making. 

When time is tight, guesswork is risky. But arranging meetings, or waiting for the answers you need to make decisions isn’t always the best option. Lag time kills your competitive edge.

Smaller, more agile businesses are reacting to changes in the market and winning more opportunities.

If you have to rely on others to collate research, you just might find that consumer behavior has changed while you were waiting. This need for agility has convinced many organizations to bring at least some of their research in-house.

With on-demand audience data, you’re free to dive in and grab the answers you need to get decisions over the line faster. It’s a pretty neat way to support your agency and data teams when they’re down to the wire; giving them time back to focus on more pressing tasks, and driving productivity and revenue.

2. Check your persona assumptions at the door

Are you 100% sure your customer personas are still accurate today? 

It’s likely consumers’ minds aren’t where you expect them to be. The cost of living crisis is playing havoc with retail figures, as people cut back spending to combat rising inflation. 

What’s true of your customers today may not be true tomorrow. 

Our latest Zeitgeist data shows that globally, over 30% of consumers plan to set a personal budget. And that’s not all:

• 25% say they’ll delay big purchases (e.g. new cars and holidays)
• 38% say they’ll reuse products more rather than buying new
• 46% say they’ll cook at home more

These are all big changes set to impact the FMCG, travel, automotive, and grocery sectors – and there’s plenty more where that came from. 

You need relevant, granular insights to complement first-party data, especially if you’re a DTC business.

See where consumers are spending their hard-earned money with always-on insight, then tap into these revenue streams while they’re still hot. With visibility over the emerging trends shaping consumer behavior on both a global and local scale, you can monitor audiences across markets, compare your assumptions against the latest data, and adjust corporate personas accordingly.

3. Empower teams to work smarter, not harder

You don’t need a background in analytics to use data to your advantage. Anyone at your organization can, and should, be an expert on your customers. 

With an easy-to-use platform, embedding audience data into your daily workflows and processes shouldn’t be scary. 

Here’s why data democratization works. 

By uniting internal research efforts in one place, you can upskill and empower teams to feel confident integrating data into strategy, storytelling, and decision-making on a daily basis. 

You need one single source of truth for timely, accurate, global consumer insights across your whole organization.

From ready-made dashboards to downloadable reports, having the latest insights on tap helps to align teams on what’s relevant to your customers right now, and where efforts need to be focused to benefit from it. Aided by rapid, reactive research, you’ll snatch golden opportunities away from competitors and serve the right message, at the right time, to the right customers. All while supporting the work of your brilliant data analytics teams and agency partners.

Why work harder, when you can work smarter?