HIGHLIGHTS:
- When marketers craft messages that match their customer expectations, it builds trust. This will help you be more successful at connecting with consumers.
- Marketers are using more data. But with so much data available, it can be difficult to pull useful insights from all that information.
- You need to be thoughtful when choosing who you market to and how you reach out to them.
- And be available to consumers who are looking for guidance before their purchase.
What is consumer behavior analysis?
Consumer behavior is the study of how people spend their money. Marketers use this information to better market their products.
Ever since Covid-19 started, we have seen a new shopping environment unlike anything we have ever seen. So, leveraging the right data is essential for successful marketers.
The customer journey is even more varied. People are at home spending more time online to find deals or not shopping at all due to financial uncertainty.
The Strategy
So, you need to define your analytics strategy and marketing strategy, work out the critical behavioral events in the customer journey. Then define the critical goals and metrics. And then find a way to track them.
Why do you buy the things you do? Where do you shop and when? Do your friends and family shop at the same places or somewhere else? How did those things change after COVID-19? Those are essential questions to ask yourself and to consider about your potential customers.
By identifying the shifts in market behavior can save you time and money. Data shows that your buyer’s journey has either slowed down significantly or sped up a great deal depending on financial security. Covid-19 is certainly changing consumer behaviors.
Finding out how customers interact with your brand
You could consider surveys, social factors, personal factors or customer interviews. By engaging with your customers, you can better understand their decisions. Customers are usually very willing to chat with you and share their experiences.
I have used ZOOM for these user interviews. And have gained quite a bit of insight from these.
By communicating with your customers, you can find out what events helped them to choose your brand, product, or service. What are the similarities you are finding with the information? What made you stand out above the competition? What would have made it easier for them to decide?
What behavioral metrics are important?
This varies depending on the industry and goals of your business. But by studing consumer behavior, we know these are the main behavioral metrics to consider.
Customer Loyalty
We all know that gaining a new clients is 5 times more expensive compared to retaining your existing customers. By boosting your client retention by 5% can give you a 25% to 95% increase in profits. Therefore, it is essential to keep customers coming back to your site.
Active Users
The first goal for a business is to attract as many people as possible. With high volume traffic going to your landing pages, you have a better chance for a sale.
Ranking on top of the SERPs (search engine results pages like on Google) will put you in front of more users with a higher opportunity for them to click on to your site. So SEO optimization is important.
To determine active users, there are key factors that can help guide you through the process.
- Logins – This is especially important for SaaS business. We can determine active users by how many are actively logged into the site.
- Length of Sessions – A good measure of how active a user is on the site is by how much time they spend there. Someone who was on your site for 5 minutes was clearly more engaged than someone only there for 1 minute.
- Pages per visit – Another good measure of how active a user is on the site is by how many pages they visit. If they only visit one page, they may not like what they found, you aren’t offering what they thought, or they didn’t like what they found. So, someone that visits more than one page indicates
- Customer Engagement – This helps you find out the level of activity on the site. This could be reading blog posts, watching a video, visiting the contact page, downloading a file, filling out a form, traffic to a thank you page and many others.
This not only helps you understand customer engagement, but it also shows you what forms of engagement are working and what are not. And finally, it shows what your customers prefer.
Revenue and Buying Behavior
This one is simple. The more you sell, the higher your revenue. Getting them to the site is not the final step. The final step is the purchase. To push them to buy your products or services by affecting their buying decisions.
It is necessary to attract more customers to increase revenue. To do this you have to increase your conversion rate.
The goal is to convert visitors into customers.
This is why website design is so important to your revenue. It is essential to provide an amazing UX or user experience to make sure your leads convert to sales. Make sure the site is as user friendly as possible.
Digital marketing can be overwhelming with all the information coming at you. With so many metrics that measure different aspects of your business. Developing a marketing plan and making marketing decisions can be difficult.
So, the goal is to use the metrics that are worth tracking, to give more time, and budget to. And which ones you should not.
Allan Todd is CEO of Pagecafe Digital Marketing. In 2022, Allan teamed up with Infront Webworks to provide digital marketing, website design, content marketing, SEO and strategy and solutions to local businesses. Allan lives in Colorado Springs.