Virtually every business engages in some form of marketing. Roughly 50 percent of businesses have a marketing strategy and the other half don’t.
If your business is in the group that markets without a strategy, it’s time to drop that bad practice. And if you have a strategy but it isn’t based on consumer behavior data, it’s time to rework it.
When you crunch consumer behavior data, you end up with insights into how your target customers interact with various brands, what they do with their time, and how they make their consumption choices. Employing this data in your marketing strategy can make a big difference in your campaigns.
Read on to learn how behavioral data will transform your strategy.
1. Geo-Targeted Marketing
Consumer data doesn’t just tell you where you target customers’ geographical location. It also tells you the unique consumption behaviors of the customers in that location. With this information, you can launch a marketing campaign that effectively targets those consumers.
For example, let’s say you run an online clothing business. Without the right data, you can easily run ads that don’t resonate with the audience you’re targeting.
Picture a scenario where you’re running ads for summer dresses in a region that’s currently experiencing winter, or in a region with a primarily aging population.
Geo-targeted marketing isn’t simply running ad campaigns in a region where your target audience resides. You must understand the region’s population, weather patterns, cultural beliefs, and a lot more. That’s how you can use consumer behavior data to revolutionize your marketing strategy.
2. Personalized Marketing
While geo-targeted marketing does a good job of reaching a broader audience, personalized marketing goes a step further. It focuses on the individual customers you’re targeting.
Consumer behavior data gives your target buyer’s personal interests, hobbies, and other details. With this information, you can infuse some element of personalization into your marketing campaigns.
Take an example of a company that sells mobile Wi-Fi for people on the go or in remote locations. One of your primary markets comprises people who love RV travel/camping.
How can you use this information to execute personalized marketing?
You can launch a video marketing campaign where the ad’s script focuses on RV campers using your internet service. You can also run print ads in RV magazines. In each case, you’d have tailored your marketing to the specific customer you’re targeting.
Personalized marketing has a great return on investment because the audience feels valued. They’ll appreciate the fact that you spoke to them in a way they best understand, and for that, many will reward you with a purchase.
3. Product Innovation and Development
As a small business owner, you might be thinking that marketing only involves the advertisements you run on various channels.
You’re wrong!
There’s a lot more to marketing. In fact, one can argue that real marketing starts during product research and development.
You’ve heard the phrase “a product that sells itself.” Well, for a product to sell itself, it must first be able to market itself.
To create a product that markets and sells itself, you need to have consumer behavior data. Some aspects of this data can influence your product development choices.
To illustrate, think of a company that manufactures and sells earphones. You commission a market researcher to collect consumer behavior data to inform your decision-making. The research establishes that an increasing number of consumers are moving to wireless earphones.
As a company, you can then decide to design and develop a new product: wireless buds. The new product will help keep the company competitive in the face of changing consumer preferences.
Entire companies and even industries are facing extinction because they react, or were slow to react, to changing consumer behavior.
Remember Kodak?
It had its glory in the days of film photography, but since the digital photography revolution began, new market leaders like Sony and Canon have emerged. Both these companies were making film cameras back in the day, but they’re thriving today because they made data-driven product development decisions.
Check out this market research to learn more about the process of researching the consumer.
4. Buyer Journey Optimization
Customers don’t make purchases out of the blue. Yes, there’s impulse shopping, but that’s the exception, not the norm.
There’s a path they follow, right from when they discover that they have a need to fill (awareness stage), to researching various options on the market (consideration stage), and finally making a purchase decision.
As a business, you want to help your prospective customers sail through their buyer journey as fast as possible. To pull this off, it’s essential to make the most of consumer behavior data.
So, how can you use this data for customer journey optimization?
It will influence your choice of marketing channels/methods.
In the consideration stage where the consumer is looking is evaluating the various products/services that can solve their problem, they will typically use the internet to research. With this info, you can refine your search engine optimization strategy to place your business in the customer’s path.
If data is telling you that the buyer uses social media as their go-to platform for searching for products and services, you’ll switch to a social media advertising strategy.
As you already know, consumer behavior is always changing. Your customer buyer optimization strategy should also change at the same rate.
Consumer Behavior Data Will Transform Your Marketing
Marketing might not be at the heart of what you do as a business, but it’s key to building a thriving business. At the heart of your marketing strategy needs to be consumer behavior data. That’s how you’ll design and implement marketing campaigns that deliver big results.
Explore our business section for more digital marketing insights.
