5 Customer Learning Platforms for Brands and Agencies
Discovery commerce. If you haven’t heard the term yet, just get ready. As the concept expands, discovery commerce is changing the way brands market their products across social media channels.
When Pinterest added checkout capabilities to its mobile app earlier this year, the company opened the door to a new type of social commerce. Integrated checkouts made it easier for consumers to complete transactions through a variety of social media channels, including Instagram and Facebook.
What some brand marketers didn’t see coming was the instant shift in how consumers would discover products online. Rather than visiting stores in person or browsing catalogs, more consumers today are purchasing products they find serendipitously — while scrolling through their Facebook feeds or watching their friends on Instagram Stories.
The integration of shopping platforms into social media has turned shopping into a part of everyday life, rather than an activity consumers set out to take part in. Now, brands are ready to capitalize on the shifting dynamic. Savvy agencies and in-house marketers are creating content that feels authentic and using discovery commerce as a way to forge deeper connections with consumers.
A new class of customer learning platforms is supplying these marketers with the information they need to create compelling digital content and target the social media users most likely to convert.
Here are five innovative customer learning platforms to watch.
1. UserTesting
UserTesting is a firm that provides businesses with reactions and feedback from customers. The “human insights” platform is powered by real-time video, so retailers can gather insights about what motivates shoppers to take action on their websites and test their competitors’ websites to identify untapped opportunities. UserTesting uses machine learning models trained to automatically pinpoint key moments in the customer experience and interactive path flows that aggregate interaction data across multiple participant sessions, to visualize customer journeys. UserTesting also facilitates ad testing, so brands can understand how their target audience will react and whether the ads they’ve designed are prompting users to take the desired actions.
2. Digimind
Digimind is a social listening and market intelligence platform for brands. The company’s intelligence software helps companies better understand the consumer insights they collect, as well as broader market trends. Digimind offers influencer identification, so brands can find the right partners for their discovery commerce initiatives and keep track of who is talking about their products in many different online communities. Brands can also benchmark and analyze influencer campaigns, using an analytics module that determines the social authority of influencers to understand how engaged their communities are.
3. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a longtime player in the customer learning space, offering a unified dashboard for multi-location brands and agencies interested in social listening, product insights, and location insights. Sprinklr offers tools that give brands a complete view into how their customers are feeling about their experiences at the local, regional, or global level. Marketing and advertising tools integrate each stage of the marketing lifecycle into a single experience, so content teams can produce high-quality assets with discovery commerce in mind. Sprinklr provides conversational commerce tools, as well, which brands can use to create personalized customer experiences.
4. Discuss
Discuss has developed a customer learning platform that agencies can quickly integrate into existing workflows. The platform facilitates live research, moderated research, and mobile experience insights, with a suite of AI-powered tools used to discover and extract insights from customer conversations. Agencies and global brands can leverage Discuss’ tools when they hold video learning sessions with customers, and when they collect UX feedback on new products or designs. Multi-location brands can also connect to consumers at a local level, which is useful when designing targeted branding, marketing, and communication campaigns.
5. Awario
Awario is a social listening and customer learning platform for digital agencies. Agencies can track, join, and amplify social media conversations about the brands they represent. They can also use Awario to identify the types of influencers on each social network who are most likely to drive e-commerce sales and see how many people are involved in and exposed to any conversation that’s happening online. Mentions can be sorted by reach to see the most important discussions first, so content teams are able to prioritize their efforts to reach the biggest audiences possible. Awario has differentiated itself from competitors in the space by launching Awario Leads, a feature for lead generation and social selling, as well.
