Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
Good morning and welcome to another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're talking about consumer behaviour in marketing. Is it really that important?
Melanie
So let's first of all, try and understand what consumer behaviour is. It's also known as buyer behaviour. And it's where marketers, normally, study individuals, groups, groups or organisations, and understand their journey through to purchasing products or services. It's not just the customer journey, but it's also understanding the emotions, the attitudes, the preferences as well, because that's also part of consumer behaviour, because it's buyer behaviour. It's been around quite a while. Looking at Wikipedia here, and it says this emerged in the 1940s and 1950s and is a distinct subdiscipline of marketing.
Esther
Yeah, it's one of those things that is really subconscious. So even when we're marketing, we don't realise that we are marketing their subconscious. It's one of the areas that you get taught whenever you study business studies. It's one of the things that, I mean, even psychologists look at it because it goes into why people choose, how they choose, how they want to see their information. Do they consume it in video format, audio format, written format? I mean, all of these things have to be taken into consideration. So it can seem very overwhelming if you haven't thought about it before now. But if you have been successfully marketing to people, then you may have inherently just hit upon the golden nugget of what your consumers are looking for and how they look for it. So we don't want to freak you out, is what I'm saying, but it is very, very important. Because if you can't identify the catalysts for buying decisions, how you expect it to spark the desire for your products in your consumer's mind?
Melanie
I think a lot of us do it, excuse me, without deliberately thinking about it, though, because we are consumers ourselves. We appreciate the behaviour behind a lot of our customers anyway, because we are customers ourselves. It's It's just a case of trying to get into all the motivations that brought you to, a: looking this product or service up. That's initially the awareness that you're building up there. Then there's the interest, looking at the variations, the competitors, the USPs of each of the products or services that you're considering, and taking it all the way down to the funnel and beyond through to retention. So if you can understand all the little intricacies that take you through that funnel, and you can verbalise it, I suppose, or if you're not really verbal, can you write it down somewhere? Then if you can see that for yourself, you can try and move it over to your potential audience as well.
Esther
I think that works better for physical products. When it comes to services, like service-based industries like yours and mine, we aren't our ideal customer because we can do all the things that we sell to people, whereas our ideal customer is someone who can't or doesn't want to or doesn't see the need to. So I think if we were to sell a physical product that we ourselves would buy, then yes, that is possibly easier because you channel into your own wants and desires and needs and think about how you buy things. But if it's a product or service that you don't use yourself, you have cats, not dogs. So if you were to sell dog food, how would you sell it? I'm a tea drinker, not a coffee drinker. If I were to try and sell coffee-.
Melanie
I wouldn't know where to start.
Esther
Yeah, I wouldn't know where to start either. It's like, oh, is it bitter or is it sweet? I have no idea. It all smells disgusting. But you know, coffee, I'm talking about coffee. But, so when it comes to products that we would use or services that we use, yes, we can get into the mindset of the consumer because it appeals to us as well. But if it's a product that, in our case, like I said, if it's a service that we sell, that we already know how to use it and we already know what the benefits are of it, but we're trying to appeal to people who don't see the benefits or don't understand why they need it, that's when it can become difficult.
Melanie
There are other ways, though, because consumer behaviour can also be monitored and tracked through focus groups. So I'm talking more summary research here. So you can conduct trials or focus panels or taste panels or depending on what your service or product is. And just getting that feedback directly from your customer is going to be enormously helpful. I guess my touch points with my consumers are slightly different to yours, Esther, in that, yes, you're right, we do forget what we know and how we know it. But I meet people every single week who still don't know it. And so I guess for me, I can hear the question, I can hear the search terms, I can hear the, the frequently asked questions I get. By using that language on a regular basis throughout my marketing and promotion, it helps me better reach my audience. It's not black and white, it's not easy all the time, of course. But that's just in my circumstance. It won't be the same for every business. But any consultant who, especially a consultant in the service industry, they'll probably find it easier because they're meeting people who don't know as much. They will have frequently asked questions and certain topics that are covered on a regular basis. They'll have blogs and parts of their website covering that topic, and they'll speak about it and all that stuff. But there's got to be a way that we can facilitate our listeners on how to understand consumer behaviour and consumer bio behaviour in general. It doesn't need to just stop at imagining frequently asked questions. The other thing is People can ask the same question, but in different ways.
Esther
That's very true. Yeah.
Melanie
So you got to think, maybe as part of your focus panels or taste panels, whatever you want to call them, you can say, look, this is the end result. What's the question for this end result? How would you get to this end result by your own means? And some people will go straight to the library, other people go and do a Google search or a voice search, which we also have to incorporate now into our fire behaviour. And some people are like me, very, very visual. I love watching videos. I much prefer watching videos. But other people are like my husband, who will just sit there and read all day, reading pages and pages and pages of how-tos and brochures in general. So you've got to accommodate for both types, don't you?
Esther
You do. And when you're accommodating for all the different types of how people consume the information that you're giving them before they make a purchase, you also have to consider their economic conditions, their personal preferences. Do they prefer one color over another? Are you giving them the option of those colors? Economic conditions, are you giving them a low priced offer, then a medium priced one and a high priced offer? Because based on their purchasing power, it depends on what it is that they're going to be able to go for. They may want to hire you immediately, but they can't afford your top package. So are you offering them a medium sized package or even a starter package to get a taste of what it is that you do and how well you can gel together? Because some people can also be put off by, oh, well, if I buy that service, I'm going to be stuck in there for 20 hours or for six months of five hours a month or whatever it is that your top package allows for them. Whereas they might just want a taster, but you don't want to give those tasters away for free either, because you know, you've got to keep the roof over your head. There's so many things that you can do to help convince them, because it is convincing. It sounds really bad, but it is trying to get into their mind and giving them options that influences their buying decisions at the end of the day.
Melanie
And a lot of the way we do this is how we've previously described in past podcasts, features It's just tell, benefits tell. It's trying to find the perfect balance of explaining those features because you need to explain the features because it's like a shopping list of things that you're going to get that you know you need. But what you're actually making is a full well-rounded meal at the end of it. That's going to support you and other people in your household or within your business or even your customers. It's a really good analogy. I just did that by accident. Isn't that great? But the features definitely would be the shopping list and the benefits would be the overall outcome at the end. How do you put that across? Well, again, because we're all marketers who are listening to this podcast, if it's not marketing you want to listen to, you're definitely on the wrong podcast. At the end of the day, our audience wants to know what's in it for them. They're giving up their time to look at your post, read your blog, open your email, visit your shop. What's in it for them? And all of us get tire kickers and browsers and that stuff. But we can still entice them with something. And it's such a valuable message you just mentioned there, Esther, about remembering to make a smaller package or little small incentives or e-Books or downloads or something like that, just to entice people, just to get people excited and to better remember your brand. Because even that's a small bit of consumer behaviour, because they've got an instant gratification, like immediate gratification. If we can feed that... I'm trying to think what's the feeling you get, like oxytocin. What's the word I'm thinking of?
Esther
Is it not that? Like the happiness?
Melanie
The happiness, yeah. The general happiness. It's a better word. Somebody's going to say... They're going to send it in through messages now. It's just if you can give that feeling to somebody really, really quickly with your product or your service, you've got a much better chance of bringing them all the way down the sales funnel, right down to retention. And better still, they then become your ambassador and your advocate for your brand and for your business. And that's how important consumer behaviour is.
Esther
Yeah. And you mentioned something there, too, that whether they walk into a physical shop or read your email, there's a Different places that people buy has to have an impact as well. Just because a supermarket sells clothes doesn't mean you're going to buy their clothes there.
Melanie
No.
Esther
Just because we have a physical office, but it's not one that usually receives people in because we work from home. But we have had clients come and say no, I want to meet you in your office to see where the magic happens. You have to have leeway for those things as well, if and when you can. I mean, if you're working from a small cabin and it wouldn't be safe to do so, then don't. But if you can get out to networking events, to craft fairs, to marketing meetups, if you can go to I don't know, coffee shops, anywhere that you can meet the people in person, that gives a really powerful connection as well. Because, yeah, you'll go to the supermarket and buy your groceries because you need to eat. But when it comes to other products and services that you're not dependent on to survive as much as food and drink, then it does come down to people versus brands or people versus big companies. So do try to put your personal touch on it.
Melanie
So we've discussed how important it is in all the various areas that we need to tap into. So let's start discussing how we can actually study consumer behaviour or buyer behaviour ourselves. What tools and capabilities do we have that will enable us to do this? Well, I've already touched on one. And that was primary research or market research in general. Obviously, there's two different types. There's primary and secondary. Secondary tends to be less up to date, but still very useful It gives you a benchmark or at least a small barometer of the consumer behaviour that you potentially have out there. But primary research is something that you organise yourself. You get a third party in, very to run it yourself yourself. But you get a third party in who reaches out to your audience and does surveys and focus groups and everything else. They conduct observational surveys and studies, and they really understand everything, pain-points, your customer journey, keywords and search terms that you would use for products and services. And they'll also understand the language that you're using as well by testing it. So can you think of any other, Esther?
Esther
Oh, yes, your analytics, definitely. Go to your Google Analytics, GA4, your social media analytics, analyse where your sales are coming in through. If you have a physical shop, can you analyse or keep a record of whether the people coming in, the foot traffic is majority female or male, what age range, those sorts of things can all be very useful when it comes to monitoring the data and seeing what demographic you're actually reaching, because you may be surprised that you may think your product or service is best suited for people that are like you and people the same age as you, but you might find younger people or older people are picking up on it more than people your own age. So doing the deep dive into your analytics is really important, and I do recommend that once a month.
Melanie
I just thought of another one, actually. You've got industry reports. Like Social Media Marketing World does a report every single year. But whatever industry you're in, there will be a report, a national or international, worldwide report on trends and latest news and updates. That will give you an insight as well of how your audience is finding your business, using your business, and whether certain areas of the world are having less shopping or more shopping. It really depends on your industry, again. So definitely consider industry reports. Again, this would more secondary research, but it would be current to that year, at least.
Esther
Yeah. And another one would be feedback. So feedback through reviews, through asking customers directly through comments on social media, comments on your website. This can really help you gain valuable insights into existing customers and consumers so that you're able to better serve new ones. So you can see what their preferences are, what motivated them to buy, how did they find you. All of these things will help you in the long term.
Melanie
And then, of course, you've got A/B testing as well. So you could be trying a certain video format or you may move from doing maybe Instagram reels to moving over to YouTube and trying and trialling that for a while. And that's all A/B testing. It doesn't have to be just done through ads, which is what I know a large amount of people think it's just done through ads. It's not. You can just do it organically as well. But that's something that you would have to explore yourself and you'd have to gain benchmark it and make sure you're monitoring it appropriately.
Esther
Yeah. So we've given you so much information in this podcast. We don't want you to feel bogged down or feel that, oh, Well, it's not something else that we have to do. It's something that you're already doing. If you have your buyer persona set up, if you are reviewing your analytics every month, if you are making sales, you're already attracting consumers. We just want you to hone in on what is really important for those consumers. And it It could be ethical, it could be financial, it could be... There's such a wide variety of things that could affect them. It could be that you take cash payments or credit card payments or flexible payments. All of these things can become a big factor. But if you don't look at the statistics, if you don't hone in on who your true customer is, then you You could still be shooting in the dark when it comes to your marketing campaigns, your, like Melanie said, organic or paid for. So just take some time and really look at your segmentation, look at your customers, who they are, where they live, where they come from, what socioeconomic status. It sounds really crude, but all of these things will help you see if you're undercharging, overcharging. So many things it will help you with. So we just wanted to bring this to your attention so that you can add it in bit by bit and just take a minute to review and see what's working and what's not.
Melanie
Well, that's all we've got time for today. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're still finding our podcast as useful as ever. I would really appreciate if you told a friend about the podcast. We've got an email list that they can subscribe to, which we send out handy tips and tricks out to. And obviously, we're an award-winning podcast with our own little Etsy store as well. So we've got a lot to offer, considering it's just the two of us sitting in our own respective rooms talking to each other, through a mic. So if you've got any other questions or you want us to cover any topics, do let us know. And we'll be back next week with another podcast. Say bye.
Esther
Bye-bye.
