The insight you’re overlooking for is right under your nose
You're likely sitting on hours of campaign retrospectives, account manager meeting notes, and strategy decks—and no one’s tapping them for insights.
Despite all the AI hype, many marketers continue to chase new data from surveys, tools, and dashboards, even as valuable insights quietly accumulate in their own backyard.
Think: meeting notes. Customer call transcripts. Support tickets. User feedback forms. Customer call transcripts. Support tickets. User feedback forms.
They’re not glamorous. They don’t come with a fancy UI. But they’re raw, real, and packed with the language and emotion of your audience. Yet too often, they sit untouched in Google Drive folders, siloed platforms, or archived inboxes.
That’s a missed opportunity.
The silent graveyard of insight
For years, marketers have obsessed over keywords. And sure, SEO is still vital. But the real shift, the one AI makes possible, is from what people are searching to what people are asking, feeling, and st
ruggling with.
Your internal data holds the answers to:
- What your buyers are worried about before they convert.
- What your users actually value in your product or service.
- Why churn happens—and how to stop it.
- What real language your audience uses to describe their problems (hint: it's not your feature set).
But we rarely use it. In fact, a 2020 Forrester report found that between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics.
That’s not a gap. That’s a goldmine.
AI helps you scale your listening
Yes, reading 100 support tickets sounds like a slog. But feeding 100 support tickets into a well-prompted AI agent? That’s the difference between burnout and breakthrough.
When applied thoughtfully, AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM, Claude, or Perplexity can:
- Sift thousands of lines of meeting notes and pull out patterns.
- Analyze customer support logs to isolate top issues.
- Summarize call transcripts to highlight objections or moments of delight.
- Identify frequently asked questions across multiple feedback channels.
Joelle Irvine, a growth strategist, captured it well in a recent Third Wednesday Webinar on Marketing Research Reinvented:
“It’s not about remixing the internet. It’s about deeply understanding your customers by listening at scale.”
Start here: one source, one prompt
You don’t need to boil the ocean. Start small.
Pick one internal dataset—maybe ten customer call transcripts, a folder of meeting notes, or a few pages of support tickets. Then ask the right question:
- What objections come up most often?
- What words do our customers use to describe their needs?
- What problems keep surfacing across multiple touchpoints?
Use a clear prompt structure—role, inputs, instructions, and format—to guide your AI tool.
From there, you can:
- Build an FAQ page grounded in real language.
- Improve messaging alignment across sales and marketing.
- Uncover early signals of churn or feature fatigue.
The data is there. It’s waiting.
Your internal documents are more than operational noise—they’re the voice of your customer, uncensored and underutilized. It’s time to treat them as the strategic assets they are.
The future of marketing isn’t just faster or more automated. It’s more informed. And the best insights aren’t out there somewhere. They’re already in your hands.
Final Thoughts
What if the best campaign idea, your next winning content pillar, or a breakthrough insight into your audience is already sitting in your meeting notes?
Before you invest in another research tool or brainstorm session, check the assets you already have. AI can help—but the real value lies in what your team has already heard, written down, or recorded.
The insights are there. You just need to look.
