Just like everyone else, you’re making decisions from the time you wake up until going back to bed. During this course of action, brands often come up: which tea should I get today? Should I buy this new pair of pants at this ecommerce store? What’s the best software to help organise my day?
Brands are everywhere, as online businesses. Product decisions are present in people’s daily lives and, more than than, they dictate consumer behaviors.
In the digital age, we have plenty of ways of making a product, brand or store visible all over the world. Yet, at the same time, our competitors are one click away from taking our customers to their platforms.
So now we ask you: what do you think makes a customer choose your store?
Between so many factors such as quality, credibility and price, one of the most important ways for ecommerce stores to be successful today is by looking at their own customers.
To truly know your customer is like winning the lottery in terms of brand awareness.
When you have an audience and understands their needs, what they’re looking for and their purchase habits, you can sculpt your strategy based on what you can offer. That also happens to be what your customer needs.
This is how marketing psychology works. By analysing data, marketers can help brands study their customers, their consumer habits and so much more.
What is consumer behaviour
Consumer behaviour is the study of the different ways people interact with brands. How they choose what they’re going to purchase, how they browse different websites, and so on.
Consumer habits dictate the main goals of a broader marketing strategy.
Don’t think only about physical products here: consumer psychology can gather data from about anything. From eating clean to buying a book online, you can analyse how your customer is dealing with lifestyle changes, services, and goods in general.
With many analytic tools, data is more detailed than ever, and the importance of consumer behaviour becomes even more clear.
Successful brands are not looking only for one-time purchases anymore. They’re looking for customers that will stick with them for the long-term. This is even more prominent when we talk about brands in a digital environment.
Customers that will buy something and leave for good are not as valuable as those who will become advocates of the brand.
How consumer behaviour can impact your brand
By having a strong market research, you’re capable of analysing how you can reach your customers in the right way.
This analysis might bring you hundreds of insights and lots of new data to work with. In most cases, the first time you decide to analyse your customer is so powerful that a new strategy might be needed. This might sound like hard work, but it’s based on your customers and will maximise conversions.
If you need some help gathering valuable insights directly from customers to kickstart this research, take a look at our article on customer feedback.
Customer habits provide a valuable guide to creating ads, for instance. These insights can help you decide where ads should be placed or which tone of voice you should use to reach the right people.
The importance of consumer behaviour in advertising is focused on building connections.
- Give a reason for consumers to choose your brand over your competitors.
- Study the data you gathered from your customer and study how your brand can fit in their lives.
- Build a connection between your product and their habits.
That’s where the technology comes in. When you have this data collected you can work your way through the lives of your customers in different ways, such as:
- Better marketing segmentation on ads
- Bounce rate and customer behaviour when they are on your website
- Adapt your website based on your customer’s behaviour when they’re online
- Choose the right words that might trigger them to be interested
- Understand the type of consumer they are and offer better copy based on that
- Use email open rates and user clickage to segment when they’re highly interested
Here a few tools that can help you collect consumer behavior insights:
Those are few examples of how market research can bring new insights into your strategy. The importance of consumer behaviour is based exactly on who you want to reach and what are their habits. This is essential for your brand to grow and a great weapon to restructure your marketing strategy.
Marketing strategies should always be about the customer. By focusing your strategy on consumer habits and behaviour, you’re offering what they need and the way they need it.
On top of that, consumer behaviour can also dictate other crucial parts of your business, from the way you offer customer services to your clients to your website’s UX.
Companies should pursue consumer behaviour analysis like a science, making sure every aspect of their habits are covered in their strategy. For most, however, these insights are still not that important – or completely overlooked.
Once again, connection is the key. Not every brand sees connection between their customers and their brand as a main goal of their marketing efforts. This is making them lose hundreds of thousands in advertising.
Factors influencing consumer behaviour
It’s important to understand how consumer behaviour is build before pursuing a research strategy. What is making your customers purchase your brand today? What is making them stick to someone else’s website? Why people behave the way they do on your website?
Behaviour is all a matter of influence. That’s something naturally developed within us that we need to understand and adapt if, as a merchant, we want to succeed.
There are many details that can influence customer behavior, such as:
Social Influence
Family, friends, connections in general and, most recently, Instagram influencers. The groups this person identify with. This will vary according to their social class, education levels and income, but it will always be the strongest one.
We tend to choose products because someone of our trust recommended it to us.
Cultural factors
Close enough to social influence, it’s based on their taste in music, religion, digital behavior and priorities in life. If a person has a family and needs to provide for them, their behavior is already completely different from someone who is single.
Personal role
The behaviour of someone is somewhat determined by the role they play in a society they’re inserted in. You might be in the same group as a friend that has a similar social influence and cultural factor as yours, but your personal role is always unique.
Those factors work together in building the habits of someone who is prone to connect to your brand. After you have all this figured out, focus on the means of this connection.
Final thoughts
Any company is capable of learning about its customers’ behaviour. You can start small, make a few tests and see how it goes. Small changes can already cause big reactions on how your business might be seen by your customer – and how much you’re selling.
Focus on understanding the needs of your customer and building a real connection between them and your brand. Understand that those numbers you usually see as purchases are also people, and the best way to build a real connection with them is through their own needs.
