Wouldn’t it be great to create digital marketing strategies that generate insane leads and sales? While that’s the goal of every marketer, reaching it requires that you dive deep into your user’s mind and heart–What influences them? What motivates them? What are their pressing challenges? And how does your product or service fit into the solution?
Or, in simpler terms, you have to understand your consumer’s behavior.
If you disagree, then this article is for you. Here, we’ll show how consumer behavior shapes digital marketing and how you can leverage it to create the most impactful campaign and strategies from day one.
Why Understanding Consumer Behavior Is Important in Digital Marketing
Consumer behavior is the actions and decisions that persuade people to purchase or use products. For digital marketers, it is the key to understanding how their customers think, act, and interact with brands.
Studying consumer behavior helps marketers identify factors influencing consumers’ buying decisions. Plus, with 63% of all shopping beginning online, a deep understanding of consumer buying behavior can help reveal:
- What encourages consumers to choose one product over another
- What’s stopping them from completing the purchase
- How they approach certain brands online
Brands are constantly leveraging and influencing our behavior. Think about how Amazon compels you to spend more than you intended every time you open the website–that’s the power of understanding consumer behavior.
We can find another example in the realm of manufacturing services, where demand forecasting plays a pivotal role in optimizing the supply chain and meeting customer expectations efficiently. By leveraging sophisticated data analytics and machine learning algorithms, cloud manufacturing software can analyze past consumer behavior patterns to anticipate future trends and demands. This proactive approach empowers businesses to make well-informed decisions regarding inventory management, production schedules, and resource allocation. As a result, companies can respond swiftly to evolving customer behaviors, minimize lead times, and maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic digital market landscape.
5 Ways Consumer Behavior Shapes Digital Marketing
Whether you are starting an eCommerce business or a traditional brick-and-mortar store, knowing consumer behavior is crucial. It influences every aspect of business, from products, services, and features to delivery.
Here are the top five ways it helps shape digital marketing:
- Digital Touchpoints Personalization
A 2021 McKinsey report found that 71% of customers expect personalization. And 81% of online customers want seamless transfers between digital touchpoints throughout their buying journey.
Customers expect this cross-platform personalization everywhere, from website designs and mobile optimization to social media and content marketing.
Thus, leveraging consumer behavior insights, you can create customized experiences across all the digital touchpoints, make data-driven decisions, and build brand loyalty.
- Content Creation
From creating visually appealing content for younger audiences to more in-depth and informative blog posts for professionals, consumer behavior remains the cornerstone of every content creation effort.
Marketers use it to decide the content topics, formats, tone, and call to action.
By utilizing consumer behavior data, you can create content that’s more likely to be seen, shared, and engaged with. Moreover, using tools like a plagiarism checker in your content creation workflow, you can appeal to the audience as an authentic brand–meaning increased website traffic, leads, and sales.
- Online Consumer Segments
Segmenting customers into groups with similar characteristics helps brands understand how different groups of people behave online. Using this data, marketers can create more targeted and effective digital marketing efforts catering to each segment.
Take social buying, for example. Businesses targeting Gen Z consumers (leaders in social buying) have to invest massively in social media marketing, especially in TikTok and Instagram. Whereas, if you are targeting a long-tail keyword audience, investing in content marketing to boost your company’s SEO can be a great way to reach them organically.
- Customer Journey Mapping
By analyzing user behavior at different stages of the customer journey, marketers can create more effective strategies for each stage. This helps target customers at the right time with the right message.
Caption: Customer Journey Map (Source: )
The customer journey maps created after studying user behavior put you directly into the consumer’s perspective. From there, you can see what you may be missing and what you can improve throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Social Proof and Reviews
Consumers place a lot of trust in genuine social proof, especially if it comes in the form of online reviews and testimonials. This consumer behavior plays a critical role in the final purchase decision. Savvy digital marketing strategies recognize the importance of engaging customers after they’ve made a purchase, prompting them to share their experiences on various online platforms.
By leveraging post-purchase engagement, businesses can tap into a satisfied customer base. This not only reinforces the credibility of their products or services but also fosters a sense of community around the brand. As satisfied customers share their stories, potential buyers are more likely to trust the brand and feel more confident in their own purchasing decisions.
Imagine, for instance, that you’re hosting an event to increase event conversions, such as sign-ups and purchases. Here, showcasing online reviews from previous attendees and customers can help you instill trust among potential users.
Leverage Consumer Behavior to Create Impactful Digital Marketing Strategies
Now that we know the crucial role consumer behavior plays in shaping effective digital marketing efforts, here’s how you can leverage it for your brand:
Utilize Customer Data
The most basic consumer behavior data includes information that reveals your customer on a fundamental level: age, location, name, etc.
However, brands must also collect quantitative (website visits, purchase history, social engagement, and conversion reports) and qualitative (customer satisfaction and lifetime value) user data.
So, utilize the data to understand the type of your customer’s buying behavior, identify patterns, and discover the gaps in customer experience. Look for recurring trends and common roadblocks that pop up at different customer stages and create strategies addressing these challenges.
Develop Detailed Buyer Personas
Based on the gathered and analyzed consumer behavior data, create a detailed buyer persona. Ideally, you want to identify the features of your highest-revenue generation customers. After all, these are the customers you want to replicate when finding new ones.
Buyer persona can help you identify and prioritize required adjustments, structure interaction, and be more laser-focused in your campaigns, as you’d know exactly who you’re targeting.
Caption: Buyer Persona (source: )
Marketers also love to interview people (potential customers, existing clients, and past buyers). They can provide you with a wealth of information about their sentiment towards your solution, competitors, and industry, both good and bad.
These interviews can also be an incredible tool for understanding the existing needs of the customers and current market trends. For example, because of the popularity of short videos among consumers, Amazon has created an opportunity for its influencers to earn money from short-form video content through shoppable videos.
Optimize User Experience
Closely monitoring user behavior is a great way to identify potential challenges customers might be experiencing. It’ll also help you optimize every step of their journey–starting from signup to the post-purchase experience.
Monitor consumer behavior at every stage of your user journey:
- Marketing metrics
- Landing page conversion rate
- Churn rates
- Product usability
- Customer satisfaction
Use different tools, approaches, and tactics to analyze user behavior from all angles. Based on your findings, work on eliminating all the roadblocks and providing a better user experience.
Build Trust and Credibility
Trust drives spending, and by using consumer behavior data, you can build trust and credibility for your brand. Here are a few ways to do it:
- Provide top-notch customer services.
- Ask for feedback on customer surveys and act on them.
- Understand what consumers expect from you and deliver it.
- Craft unique digital marketing messages that place you as a trustworthy brand.
Tools and Technology
Tech is revolutionizing digital marketing, and to stay ahead of the curve, you have to utilize it to its full potential. Using these tools and technologies, you can harness consumer behavior data dn insights to create more targeted, relevant, and personalized digital marketing strategies.
So, consider adding these tools to your digital marketing toolbox to reap the maximum benefits out of your efforts:
- Consumer relationship management software
- Social media monitoring and listening tools
- Website analytics
- A/B testing platforms
- Demand forecasting systems
- Customer Feedback analysis
The need for these tools will vary depending on your industry, target audience, and business. But, with the right tools at your disposal, you’ll streamline your digital marketing campaigns and automate lots of processes.
Test-drive different combinations as per your business and budget, and soon you’ll have it all sorted out.
Conclusion
The success of your digital marketing efforts depends on many factors, but if you’re diligent in solving your customer’s pain points, you’ll never be too far from success.
So, using the above tips, equip your digital marketing effort with consumer behavior insights and see your sales go through the roof.
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