Return on Insight

Posted on January 14, 2009 written by Mark

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ROI is critical to business success. Businesses have to pay attention to ROI ( return on investment ). Everything a business does goes back to the bottom line. Your marketing plan has to consider the additional business each initiative will bring to you and if it will be valuable. In today’s fast paced world making these decisions gets tricky. How do you know what your customers will respond to? Would it be valuable to have a deep enough relationship with your customers to know what they’re thinking? If you establish direct communication channels and listen, learn and evolve you can develop a broader ROI, a return on insight.

What is Insight?

Insight means the capacity to gain an accurate and deep intuitive understanding of a person or thing. Insight takes a combination of listening, learning and evolving in a continuing flow. With insight communication becomes more valuable. Communication flows full circle and evolution turns communication into trusted conversation. The conversation is ongoing and never really ends.

A Circle of Perpetual Value

Listen

There are many ways for small businesses to listen to what’s being said about them. Google search, Alerts and Twitter are some basic starting places for listening. There are many quality services available that can uncover and analyze what people are saying about you inside communities and the open web. Conversations are going on about your business at all times. Listening is a continual process that yields insights into your customers attitudes, discovers influencers and the best places for engagement on the web.

- Continually listening

Learn

Learning is a process of actively launching small initiatives, discovering opportunities and designing activity plans. Analyze what’s working and then redesign. Learning helps focus on quality activities and reduce unproductive activities. To truly provide insight you never want to stop learning.

- Continually learning

Evolve

Evaluating return on insight is continuing process of adaption to the awareness that your listening and learning is bringing. To benefit from insight your business needs to be flexible enough to pay attention to what’s working and make adjustments. Navigating the course for your business takes a combination of reading the information and discovering insights to help you move forward with clarity. Insight helps you steer a flexible course of success.

- Continually evolving

Questions for Reflection

Here are some reflection questions from David Armano’s “The New Focus Group: The Collective”

1. Are you actively listening to your customers in the places they frequent online?

2. Are you launching initiatives that can be easily updated? Are you enabling a “culture of rapid response?”

3. Are you evaluating current processes and updating them as needed?

4. Are you building a culture in which “failure” is acceptable?

5. Are you allowing your teams to create “pilots” prior to scrutinizing them through traditional ROI exercises?

6. Are you planning initiatives that will help your organization learn prior to backing major marketing campaigns?

7. Are you synthesizing qualitative insights in addition to analyzing hard data points?

8. Are you tweaking your strategy along the way—and adapting where change may be needed?

9. Are you empowering all members of your teams to think and act like “digital anthropologists?”

10. Are you evolving the tools and methods to measure success (i.e. going beyond clicks and impressions)?

Revolutionary Insights

In the rapidly shifting world of today insight is more important than ever. Insights help us design solutions to the rapidly changing needs of our customers. By listening and engaging we have the opportunity to be more in tune with customers needs and also to evolve more quickly as our markets do. The opportunity to be connected like never before brings the potential to create new ways of doing business with more consciousness. Increased consciousness in business is good for people and good for our world.

sources: David Armano’s Business Week Article and Beth’s Blog