Define your audience’s buying behavior

1. Examine your audience's buying behavior by understanding their priorities, engagement habits, buying behaviors, ideal pricing, and social media activity.

Tailor your marketing campaigns to suit your customers’ behavior to improve their experience and satisfaction. Consider questions like What products do your customers love? What are their favorite engagement topics? Who are their followers? For example, you may discover that your audience responds to offers for free training more than price reductions. Use such metrics to inform your brand messaging style to influence the audience’s buying behavior. Leverage emotional appeal to know things that excite them. Curate your campaigns to appeal to their emotion.  Use social proof. For example, positive reviews, testimonials, and recommendations can trigger customers to try products.  Take advantage of buyers’ purchasing anxiety. Personalize their experience to make customers feel special.  Make your customers be first. For example, Sony uses the preorder option to drive sales while making their PlayStation fans feel superior.

2. Define the buying behavior by using Google Analytics to understand trends and patterns with purchasing behaviors. Navigate to Acquisition > Overview to see which pages get the most traffic.

Track sources of traffic, conversion rates, average time on page, and bounce rates to help you understand what your audience likes and dislikes. The amount of traffic enables you to identify which parts of your campaigns are working and which are underperforming.  Understand user behavior by using age, location, gender, and audience’s interests to inform your marketing decisions. Find reasons that motivate customers to search so that you can tailor answers to meet their search queries.  Establish the buyers’ intent to buy. Demographics dictate customer search queries. For example, someone looking for Nike shoes in Dallas will probably type, buy Nike shoes in Dallas, or Dallas Nike shoes. Alternatively, an elderly person might type comfortable Nike shoes in Dallas. Understanding variation in search terms enables you to tailor keywords for a particular audience.

3. Supplement quantitative research with qualitative research by using surveys to interview, doing user research. Harness feedback to know specific behaviors that motivate customers to make buying decisions.

Identify factors such as product promotions, trends, and customers’ needs that influence the buyer’s decision-making journey. The decision-making process for consumers occurs in these steps:  Need recognition and problem awareness. Information research. Evaluation of different products. Purchase. Post-purchase evaluation through reviews, testimonials, referrals, or signing up for memberships. Use quantitative research to know the number of customers responding to your campaigns. For example, you can say that 50 people in Chicago love the product, but they think it is expensive compared to similar products. Use qualitative research to understand how social factors such as lifestyle, race, and economic class influence buying decisions.

4. Write the trends and patterns that define your audience’s buying decisions. What market triggers increase sales? How does the audience respond to change in technology, price, and quality?

Identify situational factors that influence what and when consumers buy. For example, the current surge in car demand is due to people’s fear of contracting COVID-19 while using public transport. Consider market offerings that can cause a seasonal rise in sales or your audience’s activity. For example, events such as Black Friday can cause an increase in the audience’s search for particular products.  Understand your audience’s culture, social class, family, and reference groups to establish personal factors that influence their buying behavior.

5. Categorize your audience by using their knowledge of attitude towards, use of, likes and dislikes, or response to a product, service, promotion, or brand.

Behavioral segmentation enables the development of marketing campaigns suitable for a specific audience. Personalize services through unique offerings or customizations to nurture the audience’s buying journey. Use data to create patterns that predict customers’ behavior to improve their experience. Know your audience’s purchase patterns.  Audiences with complex buying patterns showcase differences in the brands and products they use. For example, a person purchasing a mix of luxury cars and low-end cars from various car manufactures displays a complex buying behavior.  Identify audiences seeking variety. For example, a person using Colgate toothpaste might want to try Rembrandt or Sensodyne.  Identify when the price vs quality plays a significant role in the audience’s purchase decision.