The What, the Why, and the How of Behavioral Insights

Understanding consumer behavior is an important part of any marketing strategy. These insights allow companies to tailor their marketing approach and communication to a specific audience.

What influences your customers’ buying behavior? How long does it take them to make a decision? What factors do they take into consideration when selecting a product or service?

Answers to these types of questions provide insights into consumer behavior. Also known as “behavioral insights,” they incorporate elements of human psychology into the world of marketing.

Research in this area has proven to be an invaluable tool to companies across industries. Organizations can leverage information gained about the buying habits of their target audience to better approach and communicate with current and prospective customers.

Applying Behavioral Insights

So why should you understand the behaviors of your customer base? Because understanding your audience’s pain points, motivators, and purchasing timeline will help you better tailor your approach to fit in with their typical buying behavior.

For example, if the key decision maker for purchasing your product is the head of the IT department, he or she will most likely want to know about the technology of your product and how it works before buying. Knowing that, you could incorporate more detailed information into your marketing materials or distribute videos that include product demonstrations.

While an IT director may be willing to take the time to read technical material or watch a video, a CEO, who tends to be extremely busy, probably isn’t. If you are targeting CEOs, then, you would need to make sure your marketing materials highlight what your product can do for their business in an easy-to-absorb format.

Research Your Audience

Now that you know what behavioral insights are and how they can help your company, let’s look at what you can do to discover how your particular audience behaves when purchasing or interacting with a product.

Marketers can use a variety of tools to learn more about the behaviors of their target audience. One of the most established methods is through qualitative research into your target audience.

This tried and true method involves looking at trends found among a certain population of people. For business-to-consumer companies, populations might be based around demographic information such as age or income status. For business-to-business companies, populations of interest may be based on job title or status.

Once a population has been defined, you can learn more about it through administering surveys and conducting individual and group interviews. Asking questions around why they buy a certain product as opposed to another, what characteristics are important to them in a particular product, or how they learn about a product will help you discover what goes into their purchasing decisions.

Take it a Step Further with Analytics

As customers have transitioned to using digital platforms to make purchases, it has become easier to collect and monitor data on a wider range of consumer behaviors. Tools like Google Analytics track consumer interactions, making it possible to gain insights such as:

• The demographic groups that are interacting with your company and product
• The products and content users find most interesting (based on number of visits/views)
• The number of times a customer visits your website before making a purchase

Some analytics tools can even drill down to individual customer preferences (instead of preferences of a particular group), allowing for almost complete customization of marketing touch points and materials.

Get Started

Clearly, behavioral insights can provide huge opportunities for any company, regardless of their industry or target audience. To be most effective, these insights should be incorporated into your overall marketing strategy.

Don’t have a marketing strategy yet? Call FrogDog – we can help!

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