In a world of increasing competition, understanding your target market is vital. Conducting thorough research of past, current, and prospective customers helps you uncover insights to improve your product or create more effective marketing messages. Those insights don’t have to be hard-won, either. Thanks to new tools and data sources, businesses no longer have to …
In a world of increasing competition, understanding your target market is vital.
Conducting thorough research of past, current, and prospective customers helps you uncover insights to improve your product or create more effective marketing messages.
Those insights don’t have to be hard-won, either. Thanks to new tools and data sources, businesses no longer have to rely on traditional methods like surveys and focus groups.
Ready to learn what your audience really wants? These are the 15 best market research tools to use.
Benefits of Leveraging Marketing Research
There’s a reason the global revenue of the market research industry has more than doubled since 2008 and is now valued in excess of $76.5 billion. It comes with a heap of benefits. Any business wanting to improve their product or launch a new marketing campaign will be at a significant disadvantage without it.
Market research keeps your target audience at the center of every decision. By understanding their needs and desires, you can tailor everything from your product to your marketing to your customer. In doing so, you’ll reduce the number of bad customer experiences—one or two of which are enough to make 66 percent of customers switch to a competitor.
Market research tools can also help you discover new business opportunities and threats. New markets become obvious when speaking to customers and understanding their behavior. So, too, do competitors and external threats that could threaten your business if you don’t act.
Ultimately, using market research will give you a huge competitive advantage. That’s because of the benefits above and because less than 40 percent of marketers are using consumer research to drive decisions.
How to Use Marketing Research Data in Your Marketing
You can leverage market research data in several ways, but using it to inform and optimize your marketing strategy, from campaign creation to execution, is one of the most powerful.
For instance, market research can ensure your new product launch goes off without a hitch. Almost half of all product launches are delayed, and 20 percent fail to meet targets. By understanding exactly what customers want, a successful product launch simply becomes a case of delivering it.
Market research can also help you focus your marketing efforts on areas where you have a competitive advantage. By understanding what customers are really searching for, you could identify untapped markets with very little competition in terms of paid ads or SEO. Focusing your efforts here, rather than on saturated verticals, will send your ROI soaring.
Finally, you can use market research data to optimize your marketing efforts after launch. Analyzing social media and other types of user engagement data can highlight how effective each message is so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
5 Best Free Marketing Research Tools
You don’t have to spend a dime to get the benefits of marketing research. There are plenty of free market research tools out there. I’ve highlighted five of my favorites below.
1. Google Trends
Google Trends shows you what people are searching for on Google. It was introduced in 2006 and tracks the popularity of topics over time by location. You can see exactly how popular searches are for Taylor Swift in the U.S. this year. Or how searches for Brexit have declined in the U.K. since 2019.
At the time of writing, Google processes 102,000 searches every second. That’s 88 billion searches every day, making it the largest and most valuable search data source in existence. Google Trends gives you access to that data in a categorized and aggregated way.
Enter a trend and Google will show you how trendy that term is with a line graph and give you a score out of 100. You can also compare different terms.
Pros
easy to use
visually appealing
huge amount of data
Cons
doesn’t show the exact search volume
related topics aren’t always relevant
Price
Free.
2. Facebook Page Insights
Facebook Page Insights is a fantastic and free market research if you use Facebook to market your business. If you don’t use Facebook for marketing yet, you probably should. With 2.9 billion monthly active users, it’s one of the best social media platforms for marketing.
The tool provides insights into your audience, post performance, and the health of your pages. You can use the tool to see who likes your page and why, which posts get the most engagement, and learn how to increase the reach of your content.
Think With Google is one of the search giant’s lesser-known tools, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful. It’s a free-to-use resource library of facts and figures based on Google’s own data and other research that can supercharge your marketing efforts.
If you want a broad understanding of what’s going on in the world, Think With Google is a great starting point. Search the platform, and you can uncover marketing trends, understand the latest consumer behavior and find the insights you need to drive your marketing strategy.
The site is split into four areas (Consumer Insights, Marketing Strategies, Future of Marketing, and Tools) which you can use to find the insights you’re looking for.
Pros
huge resource of statistics and studies
easy to use
great for marketing research
Cons
limited to marketing studies
Price
Free.
4. Living Facts
As part of the Pew Research Center, LivingFacts provides a free overview of how Americans live today. It’s bursting with research, statistics, infographics, and videos that can help you understand the opinions of your U.S. customers on everything from religion and work to health and family.
The site gets its data from several sources, including the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel, the U.S. Census Bureau, and other reputable organizations. If that wasn’t reassuring enough, you should know the Pew Research Center has over 160 staff members and 11 different research teams. In other words, you can trust the data on LivingFacts.
Pros
great for understanding U.S. demographics
huge amount of free information
understand your target audience across multiple topics
Cons
limited to the U.S.
research can be too basic for some
Price
Free.
5. U.S. Census Bureau
The U.S. Census Bureau website lets you search U.S. census data for free. The Bureau of the Census conducts over 130 surveys a year (which are used to allocate billions of dollars in federal funds), making it an in-depth source of reliable data.
You can filter by several variables, including age, location, and income. It also provides visualization of some data sets. One interesting way to use this data set is to filter the results using your business’ NAICS code to see where and with whom your industry is most popular. This is a great way to discover new target markets.
Pros
one of the biggest demographic resources online
easy to search through reports
Cons
limited to the U.S.
older census reports can become outdated quickly
Price
Free.
10 Best Paid Marketing Research Tools
Free market research tools are a great way to dip your toes into the industry. However, there will always be limitations when you don’t pay for the data. If you’re serious about market research, you’re going to want to pay for premium access. These are the best paid market research tools to use.
1. SurveyMonkey
So far, we’ve only discussed secondary data sources. If you want to collect your own market research data, polls and surveys are one of the best methods. SurveyMonkey is one of the best and most popular tools to use, with over 20 million questions answered using the platform each day.
The company’s enterprise-grade platform makes it easy to create, send out, and analyze surveys. Surveys can be sent via a link, email, social media, or embedded into a web page. You can browse through individual responses or use the tool’s custom reports and charts to visualize data.
Pros
easy to use
good template selection
great free plan
Cons
analytics could be improved
lack of customer support
Price
Basic plan is free. Standard plan costs $99 per month.
2. Statista
Statista is a hub of visual data, market research reports, and statistics. It collates data from several reputable sources, turning most of them into graphs and charts that are easy to digest. Because Statista’s data is continually updated, you can keep coming back to the same chart year after year to see how trends are changing.
The site has data on almost any topic you can imagine, making it a great way to discover consumer behavior and market trends, no matter your business.
Getting started with Statista is as easy as searching for a particular topic. The site’s search functionality is excellent and will return hundreds of reports and dashboards that you can use to influence or support your marketing efforts.
Pros
one of the best statistical resources online
great UX
easy to search for data
Cons
free plan is limited
visuals aren’t the best
Price
Basic account is free. Premium account costs $59 per month.
3. Typeform
Typeform is another survey-based market research tool and an alternative to SurveyMonkey. It benefits from a more user-friendly design with a bunch of pre-made templates, making it easy to create forms and online surveys that you can send to customers. Typeform drives more than 500 million digital interactions every year and integrates with hundreds of other apps.
You can format questions in multiple ways, including multiple-choice, scale ratings, and open-ended answers—perfect for collecting quantitative and qualitative data. You can even use conditional logic to change the structure of your survey based on a respondent’s answers.
The respondent experience is also different. Unlike other survey tools, respondents are only shown a single question at a time. This makes for a more user-friendly and less intimidating experience that can increase the number of responses.
Pros
easy to use
respondent-friendly
strong data visualization
mobile-optimized
Cons
lack of customer support
data reporting isn’t amazing
Price
Limited free plan available. Premium plans start from $25 per month billed annually.
4. Buzzsumo
Think of Buzzsumo as the content marketing and social media market research tool. It analyzes over 8 billion articles and 300 trillion social engagements, so you can see which topics or types of content receive the most engagement, what’s getting shared on social media, and find influencers who can help increase the reach of your content.
This makes Buzzsumo an incredibly effective market research tool for any marketer looking to put together a content marketing strategy. There’s no need to second guess what’s going to rank well and receive engagement when you can use Buzzsumo to see what’s getting traction at the moment.
There are several ways you can use Buzzsumo. The easiest way is to use the tool’s Content Analyzer to search for a topic and see which articles have the most engagement. You can also set up alerts to monitor mentions of a particular optic or keywords.
Pros
accurate social share counts
great for competitor research
Cons
doesn’t include every social media channel
filtering could be better
Price
Free plan available. Premium plans start from $99 per month.
5. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an all-in-one market research tool. From creating advanced surveys to segmenting markets and analyzing data, Qualtrics does it all. Create your own survey to gather data or upload an existing data set and Qualtrics will run statistical tests and apply visualizations to help you gather insights.
There’s no need to spend time finding respondents for your surveys, either. You can use the platform to find a representative sample of your target audience and have them fill in your survey.
There’s even on-demand training to help you get the most from the platform.
Pros
easy to build surveys
excellent data reporting
Cons
software has a steep learning curve
limited customization of surveys
Price
Plans start from $1500 per annum.
6. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is an advanced customer survey tool that helps you ask the right questions at the right times. What separates Qualaroo from other survey tools is that you can embed surveys into your site, allowing you to catch users in real-time, with context. That makes their responses significantly more valuable and insightful.
Creating surveys is easy thanks to a wide range of templates and customization options. Analyzing and reporting results is also a breeze thanks to the platform’s AI-powered analytics tool. There are also tons of other features like dozens of answer types, branching questions, and automatic language translation.
Pros
easy to create and deploy surveys
analytics reduces reporting time
easy to learn
Cons
pre-built templates can be generic
dashboards could be improved
Price
Plans start from $80 per month.
7. BrandMentions
BrandMentions is another social media monitoring platform similar to Buzzsumo but with a greater emphasis on social media. It estimates it currently analyzes billions of social media mentions for over 10,000 companies.
You can use the tool to quickly understand social media users’ opinions on practically any topic. Simply search for a keyword, and BrandMentions will display the most recent social posts as well as the context in which it was used. So not only do you see what people are saying, you understand the broader sentiment around the topic.
The tool also shows a range of other metrics, including how many people view the topic each day, how many people engage with the topic, and which days the topic trends on.
Pros
great for social media research
can also be used for brand monitoring
intuitive UX
Cons
can be time-consuming to automate reports
only analyzes social media data
Price
Plans start from $99 per month.
8. Gartner
Global research and advisory firm Gartner is a heavyweight when it comes to market research. The company has three core services (trusted insights, strategic advice, and practical tools). We’re only going to focus on its trusted insights offering here.
Trusted insights offer an incredible amount of detailed, verified, and peer-driven research. It’s a fantastic way to identify trends in your industry, spot gaps in the market, and discover other insights to power your business.
These reports are at another level compared to other research teams. Gartner boasts over 2,000 research experts and several proprietary research methodologies to deliver objective and unmatched insights.
Pros
unmatched insights
unbiased data
Cons
very expensive
Price
Plans start at $30,000.
9. Tableau
Tableau is a business intelligence suite centered around data visualization. You can connect to almost any data source and Tableau will transform that data into beautiful visual reports that make it easy to analyze and share with stakeholders.
You don’t need to know any code to use Tableau, and the tool makes it easy to be as broad or granular as you like with data analysis. Import data from tons of different data sources, like PDFs, spreadsheets, and Google Analytics.
Tableau is a trusted market research tool for some of the country’s biggest companies, including Verizon, Lenovo, and Charles Schwab.
Pros
best visual data reporting tool
acts as a central repository for data
analyzing data is easy
Cons
can be slow to upload large data sources
requires you to source your own data
Price
Tableau Explorer starts at $42.
10. Ubersuggest
Ubersuggest is one of the best tools for doing SEO and PPC-focused market research. Put a phrase into the search bar and it will provide you with a list of other relevant keywords people are searching for, along with search volume and a difficulty score. You can also enter your own domain or that of a competitor to identify areas for improvement.
It’s a great tool for identifying the size of a potential market, how competitive that market is and what chance you have of ranking in it. You can also use it to get the low-down on a competitor and find out which audiences they’re targeting.
Pros
great UX
one of the best market research tools for digital marketing
wide range of affordable plans
Cons
limited to SEO and PPC data
Price
Plans start at $29 per month or $290 for lifetime access.
Market Research Tools Frequently Asked Questions
What are the primary market research techniques?
There are five main techniques for conducting primary research: surveys, one-on-one interviews, observational studies, focus groups, and field trials.
The best insight from market research is the discovery of a relevant and actionable insight about your target market you can use to improve your offering or influence your marketing efforts.
Are market research tools worth the cost?
If you are on a budget, there are plenty of free market research tools available. However, the best market research tools cost money and provide access to more data and additional capabilities that can increase the effectiveness of your market research.
Why is it important to do market research?
Market research uncovers important information about your business and target market that can highlight opportunities for your business that would otherwise be missed.
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Conclusion: Market Research Tools
Market research tools are an invaluable way to find out exactly what your target audience is thinking. Whether you use free market research tools or paid market research tools, you can uncover plenty of insights that can have a transformative effect on your business.
When it comes to building a conversion rate and search engine optimized website, speed is crucial.
If you don’t have a fast website, people will bounce faster than you can say “conversions.”
However, speeding up your website is no easy task.
Your problem could be anything from code that’s written poorly to images or large page elements.
You need to fix those issues fast, because Google will ding your website if you don’t.
The faster your site loads, the lower the bounce rate. If your site is fast, you have a better chance of ranking on Google over slow sites that drive high bounce rates.
They wanted to figure out which factors were the most common among sites ranked in the top 10 results.
Surprisingly, they found page speed and ranking don’t seem to be correlated. However, the average load time of a site on the first page is 1.65 seconds, which is decently fast.
They found that as page load times go up, the chance of someone bouncing from your site increases dramatically:
That means that if your page takes 10 seconds to load, the likelihood of someone leaving your site before it even loads increases by more than 120 percent!
This means almost all of us are missing the mark when it comes to having a fast-performing website.
In another study, BigCommerce found that conversion rates for e-commerce websites average somewhere in the one to two percent range.
Portent found page speed can increase conversion rates drastically.
Getting your speed to under two seconds can increase traffic and revenue.
So, what causes a page to load slowly?
The most common causes of slow pages are bulky images and poorly-designed coding.
If you look at any website in the modern era, it’s likely filled to the tipping point with images.
If you aren’t optimizing your images, you could have pages that take up multiple megabytes of space.
Page size and weight are often measured by page weight bytes. Simply put, page weight bytes show the total size of a web page measured in bytes.
Google’s benchmark data shows that the best practice for page size or weight is under 500KB:
But again, most of us are missing the mark here. We are vastly exceeding the recommended weight.
One of the concepts that stood out to me the most from the Google report comes from this short yet impactful quote:
“No matter what, faster is better and less is more.”
No matter how well your site is doing, there’s a good chance you have serious room for improvement.
How to Use PageSpeed Insights Tool
Most sites run slowly due to large images that take up too much space.
But that’s not always the case for every website.
You need to know exactly what’s causing your slow site speeds before you can make the necessary changes to score 100% on the PageSpeed Insights tool.
To get started, open up the PageSpeed Insights tool and enter your website URL into the bar:
Click “Analyze” to have Google run a quick test on your site.
The finished report will tell you everything you need to know about your site and what might be hindering its performance.
Here’s what my report looks like:
It’s an 87/100.
It’s not great. It’s not terrible either, though.
There’s almost always have room for improvement. My goal here is to get you to 100% by the end of this article as we take this journey in page speed together.
First, let’s look at the items that I have optimized and perfected:
Now, notice how there are only a few items on this list compared to my “Possible Optimizations” list:
This information tells me that the items on “Possible Optimizations” are a little less impactful than those I have already optimized.
Obviously, you’ll need to take care of every element to hit 100% on the Page Speed Insights tool.
You’ll want to start with the top priority items (more on this later).
Next, we want to test our mobile site separately.
You can use the mobile site tester on the PageSpeed Insights tool, but Google released an updated, more accurate version of this.
Head over to Test My Site to try it. Input your website URL and hit enter:
Google will take a few minutes to run this report, but it will give you a detailed look at how your mobile site performs compared to industry standards.
It will even tell you how many visitors you could be losing because of a lower page speed.
Here’s what my data looks like:
My load time on mobile is four seconds.
Remember: The recommended load time is three seconds or less.
That means that my speed isn’t up to par with industry standards.
Due to that, I am losing up to 10 percent of my visitors simply from poor speed performance!
Here’s what my mobile test looks like when I compare it to the industry standards:
While still in the top-performing section, I am not where I should be if I want to maximize the effectiveness of my website or drive more traffic and conversions.
Scroll down even further and Google will give you an estimate on what your top fixes could do for your website:
Google says that with a few fixes I could reduce my load times by around three seconds.
That means that I could potentially get my website to load at the one-second mark!
That’s amazing. Trust me, to save 10 percent of your visitors or more, it’s something that you need to do.
Run your website through this mobile site test to get data on what fixes you need for your website.
In this next section, I’ll walk you through fixing the top page speed problems to help you score a 100% on the PageSpeed Insights tool.
4 Ways to Land a Perfect PageSpeed Insights Score
Getting a perfect 100% on Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool is no easy task.
It’s not going to happen overnight, either. You’ll have to do some legwork and spend some hours at the grindstone.
But if you want to save traffic, drive more conversions, and bring in more revenue, you need to do it.
It may be tedious and tiresome, but you need those conversions. You can’t be lazy and risk leaving traffic and profit on the table.
Here are the top four ways you can speed up your site and score a perfect 100% with Google.
1. Compress Your Images
The biggest cause of slow pages and low scores is large images.
When I fixed this on my own site, I found a huge impact on speed.
One of the top optimization techniques for fixing image size is compression.
You can save an average of 50 percent or more on image size by using simple compression tools.
If you use WordPress, one of the best ways to do this without spending much time is to use a plugin, like WP Smush Image.
WP Smush has tons of awesome features for free.
You can smush images automatically by adding the plugin. It will scan your media library on WordPress and detect images that it can compress:
If you want to smush tons of new images for your site in bulk, you can upload them directly into the plugin.
You can smush up to 50 images at a single time, making it one of the fastest tools on the market:
If you head to the settings for this plugin, you can turn on the setting to automatically smush images on upload.
If you enable this setting, you’ll never have to worry about compression again. And if you compress all of the existing images on your site, then you don’t have to worry about it every time you upload.
WP Smush is an excellent, free tool for the everyday WordPress user.
But, if you don’t use WordPress, what do you do?
If you run a Shopify-based store and site, you can use Crush.pics:
Crush.pics says that you can expect a big jump in PageSpeed Insights scores using their tool:
PageSpeed score before compression: 75/100. PageSpeed score after compression: 87/100
If you aren’t familiar with plugins or don’t like to use them for your site, you can use free tools online like Compress JPEG or Optimizilla.
Both are fast, free tools that allow you to compress up to 20 images in a single upload.
Check out this example image that I compressed to give you an idea of how impactful these programs can be:
I reduced the file size by 68 percent in just two seconds using Optimizilla. It reduced the size from 380KB to 120KB with almost no quality difference!
You can use all of these tools for free and you should definitely implement them if you can’t use a plugin.
2. Use Browser Caching
Browser caching works by “remembering” the previously-loaded resources so that it doesn’t have to reload them upon every single visit.
When a website visitor travels to a new page on your site, all of your data, like logos and footers, won’t need to load again.
That will result in a big increase in speed when people land on your site.
How do you implement it? Thankfully, there’s a plugin for it. You don’t need to be a coding expert to do it.
Try using W3 Total Cache for WordPress sites. It’s got over one million active installs and is the most popular caching plugin on the market:
W3 Total Cache claims that it can give you at least a 10x improvement in overall site performance.
On top of that, they claim (and back up) that this plugin will help you achieve higher results on Google’s PageSpeed tools.
The tool also helps you minify HTML (which we will dive into next), JavaScript, and CSS, giving you up to 80 percent bandwidth savings.
Try using W3 Total Cache today to give your website a fast, easy boost in speed even if you don’t have coding experience.
3. Minify Your HTML
Minimizing the space your HTML coding takes up is another big factor in getting a perfect score from Google.
Minification is the process of removing or fixing unnecessary or duplicated data without impacting how a browser will process the HTML.
It involves fixing code, formatting, removing unused code, and shortening code when possible.
Once again, thanks to the awesome plugin options of WordPress, you don’t need to be a coding genius to fix this.
It’s a project implemented by Google to help mobile pages load faster.
It works by making an open-source format that strips away tons of unnecessary content, making your mobile pages load nearly instantly.
It gives users a more streamlined experience on mobile without any clunky features that don’t work well on mobile devices.
If you browse the Internet on your mobile phone, you probably have clicked on an AMP-based article.
Here’s what they look like:
They are often relegated to the “Top Stories” section of Google search results and they load up instantly.
They don’t have much formatting, which helps them load quickly and deliver the content that the mobile user wants to see.
When a searcher on Google clicks one of these AMP articles, they see the content like this:
It’s a simplified version of the real website that allows a user to scroll between different stories without leaving the web page and clicking on the next.
This feature streamlines the user experience on mobile.
Gone are the days where you had to wait 10 seconds for a site to load, then click back to the search results page, and wait another 10 seconds for the next site to load.
Here you can access the content of multiple articles without clicking the back button once.
It’s extremely effective at speeding up your site and reducing the likelihood that someone will leave.
Tons of companies are taking advantage of AMP.
The company WIRED started implementing AMP to do a better job of reaching their customers.
They were finding that their mobile user experience was too slow. Conversions were simply not happening because of the speed issues and visitor retention problems.
Deciding to invest time into AMP made a huge impact for WIRED.
They increased their click-through rate from organic search results by 25 percent.
They found a 63 percent increase in CTRs on ads in AMP stories, too.
They also were able to add AMP stories to over 100k articles on their site.
Gizmodo also hopped on the AMP train and saw huge improvements on their mobile site.
They were getting over 100k AMP page visits every single day with load times that were 3x faster than standard mobile pages.
Conversions increased by 50 percent, too.
It’s safe to say that AMP can significantly increase conversions and mobile speed, giving you a massive opportunity to score higher on Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
If you want to start using AMP on your own site, there are a few ways to do it.
It has over 80,000 active installs and has constant support and updates.
The plugin includes an AMP page builder that you can easily drag and drop page elements on:
It’s one of the easiest ways to create AMP-friendly content.
All you have to do is download and install the plugin on your WordPress dashboard and activate it.
From there, you can use the page builder on each new post that you upload.
These pages will then create an AMP-friendly version that will show up in mobile search results.
AMP is a proven way to speed up your mobile site and reduce your speed to under one second–and tons of companies are finding success with it.
Google PageSpeed Insights FAQs
Why is page speed important?
Google uses page speed as a ranking factor because it affects user experience. It may affect your ability to rank higher in SERPs.
How does bounce rate correlate to page speed?
Studies have shown that sites that load faster have a lower bounce rate. This means the user is likely having a better experience.
What industries have the slowest sites?
On average, technology and travel sites load the slowest, where local and classified sites load the fastest.
How fast should a site load?
The best practice for page speed load time is three seconds.
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Google PageSpeed Insights Conclusion
When you’ve spent countless days, weeks, and months building a new website, you want every image, element, and icon to be top-notch.
However, that often results in a site that is slower than Google recommends.
When it comes to driving conversions on your site, speed will always play a big role.
People don’t want to wait 10 seconds for your site to load when they can click back to Google and select the next result.
Scoring well on the PageSpeed Insights test should be one of your main priorities when trying to perfect and optimize your site.
To get started, you first need to diagnose what issues are plaguing your site.
Is it images, page elements, too much text, bad coding, or all of the above?
Use the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to see where the problem lies, then work through their suggestions. You’ll also want to minify code, compress images, add browser caching, and implement AMP.
These are proven steps that can have a big impact on your PageSpeed Insight score.
Scoring a perfect 100 percent on Google’s PageSpeed Insights can give your website the boost that it needs to succeed.
What are the best ways you have found to increase your site speed?
What is an insight? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the “power or act of seeing into something.” LinkedIn Insights gives you the ability to see information about who follows you, engages with your content, or may be of interest to you as a lead or new hire. Whether you’re hiring, promoting, or putting together marketing strategies, …
What is an insight? According to Merriam-Webster, it’s the “power or act of seeing into something.” LinkedIn Insights gives you the ability to see information about who follows you, engages with your content, or may be of interest to you as a lead or new hire.
Whether you’re hiring, promoting, or putting together marketing strategies, LinkedIn Insights can help you make the most of an already powerful business platform.
What Are LinkedIn Insights?
As marketers, we live and thrive with the data. Everything we do involves measuring different metrics to see what works and what doesn’t. The key to understanding the data is knowing how to look at it and turn it into action. That’s the goal of LinkedIn Insights.
These analytics aim to limit the amount of data you need to look at in order to get the results you want from your marketing campaign. You’ll essentially be able to optimize the campaign and focus on a more narrow audience.
One of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn Insights is the fact that you can cater the data to your specific industry. For example, they have several different types of insights: people, industry, advertising, and talent.
LinkedInPeople Insights
Developing the ideal buyer persona is something all great marketers must do. We need to understand our audience at a granular level; what makes them purchase, move, mad, sad, or happy? We should understand all of these factors because it’s how we’ll make the most of our marketing campaigns on LinkedIn and other platforms.
The people insights section on LinkedIn can help you learn more about your audience. The data provides you with information regarding their location, skills, occupation, and data about other people they like and follow on social media.
You can then take that data and filter it so you only get a list of the results you want. For example, if you’re involved with real estate marketing, you may need a highly targeted list within a specific location.
LinkedIn provides ways for you to narrow it down even further. You can get lists of people who engage with certain content similar to yours. Use this trick to your advantage by focusing on the content you think your target demographic will like.
For example, if you’re running LinkedIn ads centered around sports training and fitness for senior citizens, you may know that people interested in the topic are also interested in related topics about aging and retirement.
Having this data allows you to narrow down your search and zero in on your audience to provide you with the best chance of success.
LinkedIn Industry Insights
Understanding the ins and outs of a specific industry can also help catapult your marketing campaign in the right direction. Knowing what trends and insights matter to you is most important.
The industry insights section provides you with data on certain industries, such as healthcare and financial services. You can find out information and trending news within these industries, so if you’re targeting these people, you’ll know what’s important to them.
Tools like this are powerful because it helps take a lot of the guesswork and testing out of the game. It takes a lot of time to test ad copy, photos, and colors to see if they’ll resonate with your audience. While you might have a good idea of what will work before you start, you’re still not 100 percent certain (and can never be).
However, having industry insights and knowing for sure what your audience is interested in could make a significant difference in the reach and success of your campaign.
Another great thing LinkedIn industry insights can do is provide examples of what others have done correctly in the past. Thought leaders and frontrunners of a given industry tend to get a lot of attention due to their experience and reputation. Knowing what they’re doing right can help you gain a little insight into what you can do too.
LinkedIn Advertising Insights
Advertising insights exist to help you understand the LinkedIn advertising model from every angle so you can make the most of every dollar you spend. If marketers understand more about how advertising works, it can help them create more successful campaigns and ultimately a better ROI.
These insights assist with measuring the success of a campaign. You need to know which metrics are important and how they translate into certain actions that get a result.
This section also helps with branding and reach so you can better measure your performance on LinkedIn.
LinkedIn Talent Insights
One of the most powerful uses of LinkedIn Insights is the talent insight section. It’s a talent intelligence platform that helps you make better hiring decisions.
Investing in workforce development and onboarding is an expensive process. If you’re consistently trying to hire people and dealing with turnover, it may not be so much about the process but more about your talent acquisition.
Sometimes we have to face the fact that not everyone will work out even if they’re qualified for the job. By utilizing talent insights, you can get a snapshot of what other companies are doing and how skills are changing. Use that to narrow down your search with snapshots and benchmarks.
We all know LinkedIn is a great place to find new talent, but how do you tighten your search so you only discover the talent you want?
The talent insights section on LinkedIn helps you pool all your best candidates based on their experience, education, and history on the platform. You’ll receive real-time data on the supply and demand and a 360-degree view of what the current hiring landscape is like.
This is beneficial for businesses looking to grow and scale rapidly but don’t want to work through all the red tape involved in hiring and onboarding. LinkedIn talent insights help filter through the candidates so you can focus on hiring the best people for the job.
How to Use LinkedIn Insights
As we dive further into LinkedIn Insights, the benefits continue to pile up. If you’re considering implementing LinkedIn Insights as a part of your marketing campaigns, you may experience some of the following benefits.
Highly Targeted Content
Content is the name of the game, and it’s a code we’ll spend forever trying to crack. Unfortunately, there’s no handbook on producing highly targeted content (or is there?). All we can do is get as close as possible and do the best we can from there.
LinkedIn Insights can help by telling us what our audience wants to know more about and what they’d like to avoid whenever possible. We can learn this by translating the data we receive about the most engaged and least engaged content.
You can also use the insights to check out the competition and see what others are doing, then use that knowledge to craft unique content.
Improved Retargeting
Anyone in marketing knows a retargeting ad is worth its weight in gold. Retargeting involves finding someone who recently engaged with something you put out there but didn’t complete the desired action.
For example, you might have offered a free e-book in exchange for an email to add to your list. If someone clicked the ad for the e-book but never entered their email, you could then retarget them with another ad.
These campaigns are so successful because the lead is already warm. They know who you are, and they trusted you enough to at least click your link and go to the next page. Retargeting ads can have a CTR ten times higher than a regular ad.
Increased Employee Retention
A lot of hiring managers turn to LinkedIn to find and research candidates in the industry. The qualities and skills of candidates are changing all the time. One of the best ways to learn about prospects is to take a look at pools of candidates on LinkedIn and see what they’re all about.
Understanding your applicants can help you better understand how to find the best ones. If you’re looking to grow your business by hiring a few people, using LinkedIn Insights can help you find the best candidates without time-consuming trial and error hires.
Stay Hip to New Trends
Besides understanding what makes your prospective new employee tick, LinkedIn Insights also helps you learn about what customers want. With follower insights and trends, you can see certain characteristics about all the people who follow your company. You can also track trends that large groups of followers are interested in.
For example, let’s say you own an e-commerce store selling political-related gear, accessories, and clothing. Your popularity would generally skew higher around election time than it would in the other years between.
As the election approaches, you could see what trends people are most interested in, what pages they follow, and what content they engage with the most.
How to Access LinkedIn Insights
To get LinkedIn Insights up and running, you’ll want to log in to your LinkedIn account and click the “Work” button in the top right corner.
You’re brought a page that displays LinkedIn’s product offerings. To set up insights, you will click the “Insights” button.
Next, you will fill out the following form for someone to reach out to you.
You’ll eventually receive an email from LinkedIn asking for more information about your goals and objectives. This offers a nice personal touch by catering to an individualized plan rather than having a blanket offering that everyone gets.
They also offer a LinkedIn Insights tag you can put on your website to work alongside the LinkedIn Insights process. This tag works exactly like any other social media platform. You’ll copy a small snippet of code and put it on your website. You can then track all the conversions from your LinkedIn ad and gain valuable insight into who they are and what makes them tick.
LinkedIn Insights Case Study: KBC Bank
KBC Bank has one of the most prolific case studies for LinkedIn Insights. Their goal was to improve company culture by developing the best hiring and workforce management process. The problem was, they didn’t have a lot of data on candidates in the space their business is in.
While they had plenty of internal data about candidates they’ve hired in the past and retained, they knew in the current remote landscape it was important to understand the existing marketplace outside of their business.
The team at KBC Bank started using the real-time pool of data they received with Insights. They were then able to take the data and develop an action plan to hire the best possible candidates.
What did they gain as a result?
They gained a better pool of talent by tapping into markets they didn’t know they had. They took the skills and expertise of their candidates and compared them to those their competition was hiring. Finally, they accessed new data to continue to explore the marketplace and make better decisions on candidates in a shorter time using data-driven hiring.
Conclusion
If you’re considering giving LinkedIn Insights a try, my team can help you understand how to leverage your LinkedIn business profile to make the most of your efforts. LinkedIn has always been a powerful B2B platform, but a lot of businesses aren’t using it to its full potential.
Data is important, but it’s not just the data that matters. It’s how you interpret it and turn it into actions and steps to grow your business. That’s the key factor of LinkedIn Insights.
What do you use LinkedIn Insights for? Let me know in the comments.
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