Every business wants to know the future. But without time machines, worm holes and corporate psychics, how can tech companies find the vision to make themselves future proof?
Consumer insights are one of the top answers, especially when a company’s platform is directly powered by the changing needs of its paying subscribers.
For Bay Area tech company Life360, consumer insights are a kind of currency that invests directly in the company’s future. Its mobile app is the core of the platform — a hand-held way to track locations, share notifications and protect loved ones all over the globe. As its app reached 1 million paying customers in July 2021, it appeared ready to grow even further. To do so successfully, getting inside the minds of users would be paramount.
“We leverage customer insights all the time, but one that is pretty memorable is when we interviewed real customers about potential navigation updates,” said Jane Kim, senior director of product, lifecycle and content marketing. “Talking to them helped us understand what education was required for updates in the mobile app and how they use our features every day.”
We sat down with Kim and Product Marketing Manager My Linh Van to hear more about how consumer insights are leveraged for future success, and even some ways they would approach the testing of new audio channels to gain insights going forward.
What’s an example of an issue you have been able to solve using consumer insights? What technologies or techniques do you use to gain insight into a consumer’s journey and motivations?
My Linh Van: We were able to make some key decisions in the product experience for free data breach alerts by talking directly with customers and showing prototypes to gather feedback. There were many moments when we were able to challenge hypotheses or assumptions by pulling in real customer feedback. We used surveys, UserTesting.com and Maze to get these insights.
There were many moments when we were able to challenge hypotheses or assumptions by pulling in real customer feedback.”
What are the advantages and limitations of advertising your product or service through audio channels? How does audio advertising fit into your broader marketing strategy?
Kim: We use lots of different methods for understanding a customer’s journey and motivations, such as surveys, card sorting exercises, lifecycle marketing testing, prototype testing and creating feedback loops in the app.
Van: The advantages of advertising your product or service through audio channels is being able to reach a different customer segment through a different content type. The limitations are that you have to communicate through audio, which is different from how many people consume advertising with text and visuals.
To my knowledge, I’m not sure if we’ve tested audio advertising — it would be interesting to identify who the audience segment is and what audio channel is best suited for promoting Life360 and its features. Once that exercise has been completed, I think it makes sense to test this type of content and see if it will resonate with this audience on the selected channel.
