Digital consumer intelligence offers retail brands incredible opportunities to connect with consumers and meet their needs.
In this guide, we’ll take you through how to leverage search, social, and content engagement data to create killer content, monitor trends, understand demand for products, and get better reviews.
We’ll be using examples and insights from the world of DIY and home improvement. Why? We’re now over a year into the pandemic and, while it’s been a tough year for many, for lots of people lockdown also meant unleashing their creativity with DIY and home improvement projects. It’s a rich and accessible subject for us to use to demonstrate the power of digital insights.
How to use digital insights to improve content and product copy
Last year saw a significant increase in mention volume in the DIY and home improvement category when compared to 2019. Mentions related to DIY and home projects grew by 39%, and the total reach went up by 50%. That tells us that there’s a growing interest and audience in this category.
To further investigate what was powering conversations last year, we used Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer. What types of questions were consumers asking last year around DIY and home improvement? Turns out, the “What”, “How”, and “Can” types of questions were asked the most.
How can retail brands use this information?
When asked about the growth in interest in the DIY space and how brands can learn from online conversations on the topic, Eric deLima Rubb, a Customer Success Director at Brandwatch, said:
"For several years now brands and companies have been moving away from a hard-sell mentality in the direction of providing more value to their consumers. And we’ve seen this with brands like Rust-Oleum that’s added website categories related to inspiration and ‘homeowner’ with DIY tips and tricks as well as a section for professionals with educational resources."
There are all kinds of ways you can improve your content with digital insights. Here’s how it can work in practice:
Incorporate relevant questions into your content marketing strategy
Here is one of the “can” questions from Buzzsumo: Can this be used with diy home fragrance fresh mixtures, for example water + lemon + rosemary sprigs, or the like?
Let’s say you’re a content creator at The Body Shop. Questions like the above can provide great inspiration for creating content for curious readers. For example, The Body Shop marketers could talk about different scents, what they represent, and how to create a signature scent for your home. Storytelling can further fuel consumer interest and expand imaginations.
Improve your product copy and descriptions
One of the “how-to” questions discovered by Buzzsumo was “How to make DIY hydroponic fertilizer”.
Brands in this space should consider adding “how-to” information as part of product descriptions, offering reliable information for those searching for answers and, hopefully, securing sales.
Build your brand’s authority as an expert in the space
Here is a “what” question from Buzzsumo: “What DIY undercoating oil would you suggest for a car?”
A retailer in the automotive industry could focus on adding website content that discusses very specific use cases for undercoating oil. It would not only be helpful for consumers already on the site, but could also help establish the brand as a go-to resource for those with questions in this category. This kind of content will likely be low-volume in terms of traffic, but could potentially yield a high conversion rate.
How can retail brands better understand demand using digital consumer intelligence?
We used Brandwatch Consumer Research to visualize different topics of conversation around DIY and home improvement. As shown in the Word Cloud below, ‘DIY home’, ‘DIY projects’, ‘garden’, ‘design ideas’, and ‘handmade’ saw the most conversation last year.
These findings echo a recent study published by the Home Improvement Research Institute (HIRI). According to the HIRI research, 2020 was “the year of the DIY project”. There’s been an increase in the sales of home improvement supplies, driven by consumers staying home and upgrading their spaces in 2020.
How can retail brands use this information?
By using digital consumer intelligence tools like Brandwatch Consumer Research, organizations can explore different product categories, segments of the population, and geographic markets to make better strategic decisions.
For more context, retail brand analysts can dig into different topics like gardening and outdoors, appliances, home office, or home decor, and learn about the conversations taking place within each topic.
- Are there any particular events that are triggering those conversations?
- Are certain keywords or phrases around different topics mentioned more frequently in conversations than others?
- Do any conversations involve your brand or mention similar products in your space?
Answering these and similar questions as part of consumer analysis can inform retail companies on emerging trends, like growing demand for a particular product or service. Once these insights are spotted, multiple teams can get to work – for example, the web team can push products that are starting to see more demand to the front page.
How can retail brands spot new opportunities with digital data?
Linked to spotting growing demand for products is identifying potential opportunities that lay outside a retailer’s current offering.
Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, we were able to break the conversation around DIY and home improvement down into key phrases and keywords and filter by sentiment. One of the main topics driving negativity in the space was the expense associated with DIY.
Upon clicking on the “expensive” bubble, we learned that some DIY projects require costly equipment that not everyone has lying around.
This trend curve from Google Trends confirms that search interest around ‘tool rental’ hit a five-year high last year.
How can retail brands use this information?
Identifying new patterns and looking into them can help organizations further understand the sentiment behind a particular conversation and potentially adjust their course of action.
For companies in the home improvement space, one of the ways to differentiate your brand from the competition, in this case, would be offering equipment for rent or even hosting DIY workshops.
How to monitor emerging trends and react to them
The official WHO announcement declaring the pandemic sent millions of employees to work from home back on March 11 2020. Many major companies have since publicly communicated their plans to go remote, some announcing it’s permanent (like Twitter), and others providing a budget to their employees to set up a home office.
According to Google Trends, search interest around ‘home office’ grew increasingly in the last week of March 2020, and those searches have remained above average ever since.
We used Brandwatch Consumer Research to look into the conversations around ‘WFH’ and ‘home office’ as well as the volume of mentions over time, and here are some notable brand interactions on social that other companies can learn from:
1. This video and article were shared by several tech reporters on social media. In the video, Nathaniël de Jong, a VR content creator, talks about 19 VR applications that can be used for remote work such as conference calls, presentations, etc.
2. A design publication Interior Design co-hosted a digital seminar on how to maximize productivity and communicate effectively while working from home.
3. Logitech threw a contest on Instagram asking its followers to submit photos of their WFH environments.
How can retail brands use this information?
- By closely monitoring conversations around your industry, product, or service, retail companies can craft unique and relevant product messages to meet consumers’ changing needs at the time of highest demand.
- By using a tool like Brandwatch Consumer Research, brands can set up unique dashboards for monitoring specific product categories and conversations around them.
- Engaging with consumers and prospects on social and making communications hyper-relatable (like Logitech did on Instagram) will help companies extend their reach, stay top of mind, and maintain their competitive edge. Brand messages that are timely and resonate with audiences always get more traction.
It’s not just conversation that can be generated by acting fast on insights, either. Products that are based on emerging trends can create a lot of demand.
December 2020 saw a large spike in WFH conversation. It was driven by a Business Insider article that described the idea of a backyard ‘office in a box’ soon to be available for purchase on Amazon. It made perfect sense that the product generated so much interest. As we hit the 10-month mark into the pandemic, people started looking for out-of-the-box WFH solutions, and a box office (no pun intended) in one’s backyard could be the answer. The right product (one that speaks to urgent consumer needs) made available at the right time (just as those needs reach their crescendo) can create incredible results for a brand.
How to leverage review data to improve products and boost sales
Authentic and positive customer reviews not only help generate revenue, they can also inform product improvement and marketing strategies.
Here's an example using reviews for Target products.
We decided to analyze reviews on Target.com for two best-selling Target-owned products in the home improvement category using Brandwatch Reviews. We were able to find a number of insights that could lead to improvements.
The two products studied were:
Product #1: Blackout Window Curtains
When looking at the ratings for the blackout curtains throughout the year 2020, we noticed that several words such as “one”, “blackout curtains”, and “quality” were the characteristics that had the highest amount of negativity associated with them.
Brandwatch Reviews uses natural language processing (NLP) to extract the entities (words or phrases) within each review, and then identifies the relevance, volume, and entity-level sentiment for each one of them. The words that appear at the top in the chart have both the highest volumes and relevance scores. NLP can help brands detect emotions in text. This can be particularly helpful when the cause of negative sentiment is not obvious (eg with the word “one” here).
When we looked at the rating distribution, we could see that several entities including “one” have the lowest percent of 5-star ratings in comparison to other characteristics on the list.
So what's going on with these reviews that mention "one"?
We segmented the product reviews and filtered them for the ones that mention the word “one”. As we sorted the results by the lowest rating, the pattern revealed itself: half of the reviews that mentioned the word “one” were concerned about the inconsistency in the length of the product. (One curtain was longer than the other).
How can retail brands use this information?
In the case of Target, the team of analysts can refer instances like this to the quality control team. Once resolved, future reviews will not feature this issue and the overall average rating (provided no new issues arise) should improve.
Product #2: ‘Hello Doormat’
In this example, we only searched for 5-star reviews to see if we could identify any potential pain points shielded by a positive rating.
First, we used a filter to deselect ratings below 5 stars. Then, we adjusted the sentiment toggle to allow us to explore excellent ratings that have a negative sentiment. This meant we could learn what the product's fans were asking the company to improve.
In this case, the word “problem” in red pointed us to a review that gave Target’s product 5-stars but also revealed a valuable insight: the thickness of the product may not work with every exterior door.
How can retail brands use this information?
Armed with this information, the team of analysts at Target could go back to the marketing team and suggest adding some relevant copy to the product description on the website. By setting an expectation on product thickness, there’s a reduced chance of further complaints.
Alternatively, the marketing team could even reach out to the reviewer and offer to ship a free product that does fit under their front door. It’d be a great way to strengthen the loyalty of an already-existing brand promoter, letting them know that their concerns are heard.
This is a great example of a low-volume but potentially high-impact data point. There might not be many people talking about the thickness of the mat being an issue, but sales could be impacted if those reviews are being seen by lots of people – especially if they’re negative.
You can learn more about the importance of including customer reviews in your marketing strategy in our dedicated guide.