When it comes to transforming consumers, the secret to more sales is understanding consumer behavior and learning what your shoppers want from your business. Understanding, analyzing, and keeping an eye on consumer behavior is crucial for companies if they want to influence their buying habits. While it involves extensive research and testing, recognizing and influencing consumer purchasing decisions- both offline and online – enables you to present your brand and products in the best possible way.
Understanding consumer behavior helps organizations increase sales conversions by meeting the following objectives:
- Optimize sales and marketing costs
- Increase the efficiency of marketing campaigns
- Increase cross-selling to existing customers
- Determine the right distribution and promotional channels.
Consumer research can provide valuable insight into the benefits, characteristics, values, use cases, problems, and motivational factors that influence their purchase decisions. Those who align their marketing decisions with what the data tells them, win time and again. Here’s how.
Identify customers with a high propensity to purchase your offering
For any business to succeed, it is imperative to define the target market carefully. This helps you tailor your value proposition and marketing to a niche audience, driving greater impact than targeting everyone. To do so, you must understand your audience’s characteristics, needs, and interests.
Understanding consumer behavior by conducting market research helps determine which customers will benefit most from your offering by not just identifying who has a need for it, but also who is most likely to buy it. This exercise allows you to segment your target audience based on demographics such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Income level
- Education level
- Marital status
- Occupation
- Ethnic background
And psychographic data such as:
- Personality
- Attitudes
- Values
- Interests/hobbies
- Lifestyles
- Behavior
Once you’ve decided on a target market, you’ll be better positioned to reach them with the right message and channels.
Determine customer context
Determining customer context enables you to better understand customer intent, their decision-making process, and the alternatives they would consider.
There are several personal, psychological, and social factors that influence consumer purchase behavior. Being aware of these factors enables contextual marketing through targeted advertising based on user identity.
Why do so many family-friendly movies release during the holiday season? Obviously, because it’s the time when families spend more time together. A recent rise in AI technology has given contextual marketing a more prominent role today. An ad that appears after you have searched for related information on the web is a perfect example of technology-driven contextual marketing.
In a time when consumers are constantly bombarded with marketing messages, contextual marketing cuts through the noise through precise, relevant, and targeted information to consumers.
Use control groups to test the effectiveness of marketing campaigns
Using a control group to test your hypothesis and customer predictions can provide key learnings to help in better understanding consumer behavior. Conducting surveys, customer analytics, and utilizing social media listening and other intelligence tools on your focus control group can help fix gaps in your campaigns before enabling its effective implementation on larger customer groups.
Analyzing metrics like email open rates and click rates to measure campaign effectiveness provides important insight into brand strength and customer engagement. Control groups help marketers tackle emerging challenges like unforeseen market events or changes in customer preferences, and identifying overlapping, repeating, or irrelevant offers. Further, studying the monetary uplift generated by the campaign on a measured KPI can also help tailor your customer engagement marketing strategies and campaigns effectively, which can help boost sales revenue.
Understand customer satisfaction
How pleased are customers with your product or service? Gathering this information can help plug gaps in existing customer acquisition processes. For example, you may find that customers have to repeat inquiries each time they move between your representatives, making it too long to respond. Gathering this insight is the first step to solving the problem.
Customer opinion about your brand affects metrics like the number of mentions, repeated transactions, and customer lifetime value or customer churn. Happy and satisfied customers will make repeat purchases and give positive product recommendations. Meeting all of their requirements, answering their needs in a timely fashion, and delivering the best quality of services, will further increase sales revenue.
Netscribes’ customer insight solutions help organizations in understanding consumer behavior more closely. We provide insights by utilizing multiple data sources and research methodologies, including qualitative and quantitative surveys, interviews, social media listening, and analytics. To know more about how we can help your firm glean insights to formulate effective marketing strategies, contact us.
