Thought Hive: What is Consumer Behavior and Digital Analytics?

Discovering consumer behavioral patterns within your company is vital to forming any effective marketing or sales strategy. Without understanding the behaviors of your customers, how can you hope to have any successful marketing campaigns or lead conversions? In today’s Thought Hive, it’s time to focus on the numbers and how you can use consumer behavior studies and digital analytics to create successfully targeted messages for your audience.

Without big data, you are blind and deaf and in the middle of a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore

What is Consumer Behavior?

Consumer behavior is a field of study based on what, when, where, why, and how individuals or groups utilize products, services, and concepts. Although this description may seem simple and straightforward, the method of studying consumer behavior is quite vast and ever changing—especially as it relates to the world of inbound marketing.

Consumer behavior is extremely informative in order to develop strong and concise buyer personas as well as create an effective and personalized content marketing strategy. Consumer behavior fosters a more personalized message within the inbound marketing content strategy. It gives marketers a better picture of their target audience, gives a more in-depth look at your competitor’s products and services, and presents the most up-to-date information on what drives the consumer to choose one product or brand over another.

Big data is at the foundation of all of the megatrends that are happening today, from social to mobile to the cloud to gaming.— Chris Lynch

 

By studying the behavior of a particular buyer persona group, your company can investigate what type of marketing would best suit your target market. For example, it would be rather silly to market Facebook on TV, especially to young people ages 15 to 25. But by studying customer behaviors, studies show that the Millennial Generation seeks the Internet for most of their needs. However, if the target audience were Baby Boomers, then it’s more likely for them to engage with a commercial on television rather than a Vine video online.

Taking into account simple trends like these can help you more effectively relay the proper personalized message in the most proficient manner; thus, creating a more effective marketing mix.

One defining characteristic of Millennials is their comfort-level with new technologies. This is the first generation to grow up with computers in the home and in the classroom, not knowing a life without the Internet or cell phones.— Doug Crang

 

How to measure consumer behaviors with digital analytics

Digital analytics is studying the data from with your company as well as within your industry from your competitors as well as your fellow partners. The goal of digital analytics is to use a more customer centric focus when analyzing data and then using it to create actionable and effective strategies for your audience.

For example, after establishing a specific group with your buyer persona profiles, consumer behavior studies help perfect each experience, product, or service that you can create for that group. More often than not, companies use a “how are we doing?” survey to gauge their effectiveness with their customers. This form of analytics measures consumer behavior in a very direct approach—creating a conversation with your customers in order to receive direct feedback. This ‘direct collection’ approach provides quality metrics to better improve your company’s sales and customer service.

Imagine you just completed a purchase on a website that is fairly new, and you needed to sign up for a 'site account' instead of just placing the order. Then let's say for example it took 15 minutes to complete this site account registration. Notice the issue?

The fact that this process takes 15 minutes whereas other sites take no longer than 5 can be a HUGE deal breaker for any potential user. But say decide you do not use digital analytics to measure its effectiveness, this issue may never arise even your customers believe that this process is 'a waste of time' and is extremely annoying. Especially in a direct collection approach, consumer behavior studies serve as a viable and necessary tool in marketing success and the success of your company as a whole.

Our job as digital analysts is to understand the new trend of customer behaviours, anticipate customer movements and interpret messages that are most effective in driving customers to conversion.— Liang Chen

 

Consumer behavior studies can also help you track trends in purchasing needs and abilities—revealing an in-depth relationship with your customers, your products, and when and how they communicate especially with one another.

Ultimately, consumer behavior findings can outline what is most important in the lives of your current customers. For instance, don’t you feel great when something you’re reading or interacting with connects with physically and emotionally? As a digital analyst, being able to tap into your customer's’ feelings is invaluable. With digital analytics and consumer behavior studies, your company can enhance your engagement and touch the lives of your customers by creating meaningful and valuable content as well as presenting the best products or services, at the best time, to meet their SPECIFIC needs.

Data really powers everything that we do.— Jeff Weiner

 

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