The importance of conducting consumer behavior analysis
Editor’s note: Austin Guanzon is the tier 1 support manager for Dialpad, an AI-powered customer intelligence platform.
By its nature, consumer behavior is constantly changing. And the nature of modern marketing means we have access to unparalleled insights to keep up with those changes. Shifts in consumer behavior can be caused by numerous factors, from buying trends and viral influencer videos to economic downturns and global pandemics.
No one knows quite what’s coming next, but the data-driven insights gleaned from conducting a consumer behavior analysis mean you can stay ahead of the game and transform the customer experience. Let’s look at how.
Understanding brand reception and consumer engagement
Quality analysis of consumer behavior helps to frame how your brand is being received and how customers intend to engage with you, ultimately enabling you to make smarter business decisions. By analyzing trends in behavior relative to product lines, such as purchasing habits and frequency, we can better design services and products to meet the needs of our audience.
This can be achieved through customer experience optimization based on the data itself, through the creation of new products that fulfill an unmet demand, or through the repositioning of key marketing messaging and tactics to better illustrate product features.
Build personalized experiences to meet customer expectations
Personalization has become an expected element of the online shopping journey, so much so that it’s becoming embedded in brand identity as more companies commit to providing a host of unique services tailored to every individual. While the exact nature of personalization will depend on the industry, many typical features include:
- Account-based personalization, including interaction history, personal information and fast-track purchasing options.
- Product or service recommendations based on previous browsing and purchasing activity.
- Unique content and messaging based on personal information.
- Special offers for repeat customers or offers based on habits.
Analyzing typical behavior and consumer tendencies can help inform where personalization could be integrated. Are customers spending a great deal of time exploring category pages searching for their ideal product? Implement a curated list of recommended products to reduce customer frustration and improve their experience.
Optimize the customer experience and improve customer satisfaction
For many businesses, long-term engagement is the path to growth and success. It’s far easier to retain a customer than acquire a new one, and the available number of fresh customers can be limited by catchment areas or the industry itself. In this way, it’s imperative to optimize the customer experience as best as possible and improve your customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Consumer behavior analysis helps to identify pain points for customers engaging with your brand, enabling you to optimize the experience to bolster satisfaction, promote engagement and increase the likelihood that customers will become loyal, long-term partners.
By incorporating tools like Person Search to obtain contact details businesses can establish personalized interactions and targeted marketing strategies, enhancing overall customer engagement and satisfaction.
How to develop effective consumer behavior analysis
With the reasons established, it’s time to roll up our sleeves and build our consumer behavior analysis process. We’ve picked the most actionable tips below with the goal of helping first-time forays into behavior analysis be successful, as well as offering a benchmark for businesses to measure their current efforts against.
As with all forms of research and strategy, repetition is the key to long-term success. Any actions based on research need to be monitored, measured and then responded to once insights can be gleaned. You should consider any investment in consumer behavior analysis a permanent one in your marketing toolkit and plan accordingly. A robust customer intelligence platform can help manage these efforts.
You may want to consider incorporating tips for building an online training program into your strategy. These tips aim to facilitate successful initial ventures into behavior analysis and provide a benchmark for businesses to gauge their ongoing efforts against.
Establish a goal for behavior analysis
Before we start pulling in data and crunching the numbers, it’s important to start any analysis task with a definitive goal in mind. While we recommend that these activities are ongoing and iterative in nature, that isn’t to say that you won’t do specific analyses across your business portfolio.
Establish a goal for the analysis you’re undertaking. This could be a new product line you’ve recently launched, where you want to gauge customer reception against previous or similar products, or to benchmark appetite for innovations to bring to market.
If you’re a fast fashion outlet, for example, our goal could even be to understand how product stock affects customer behavior. First, understand supply chain optimization. Then, ask yourself: Are there UX optimizations that can be made to redirect customers to other similar products, or should our approach to the supply chain be reviewed?
Our goals will frame our analysis and the approach to data collection, so be sure to do this each and every time without fail!
Strengthen insights through customer segments
No decision can make every customer happy, and part of making the right adjustments to your brand is understanding how various types of customers will be impacted. Customer segments let you analyze reception to products or services across key target audiences and will provide stronger insights in specific areas.
This principle follows the ethos of microservice design patterns, where applications are broken down into smaller segments for better flexibility and performance than traditional methods. Audience segmentation works in the same way.
Segment your data using readily acquirable metrics, such as age, gender, geographic location, first-time or repeat customers, or cart-abandoned journeys, and then analyze datasets with these factors in mind.
Identify product strengths and weaknesses
Successful brands are ready to innovate their products to meet the needs of customers. The strengths and weaknesses of your offerings can be measured through consumer behavior analysis to understand what is most important to iterate upon. Furthermore, you can learn how competitors are positioning their products and react accordingly.
For example, if you’re a telecoms business that offers cloud-based telephony services, advertising TCPA compliance may not seem like a winning strategy when more exciting features could be at the forefront of marketing messaging. Data could reveal that customers value knowing they are safeguarded from TCPA violations when using your service, and this leads to more conversions.
Gather data, gather data, gather data
Set in place a range of data collection strategies to get the best results. Data can be procured through several ways – on-site metrics found through popular analytics platforms; the purchasing behavior and personal information of existing customers; purchasing of market research, surveys and social engagement – and can be split into hard and soft data sets for analysis.
Employing advanced techniques such as text analysis can further enhance the depth and accuracy of insights derived from consumer feedback and interactions. By analyzing text data from customer reviews, social media interactions and other textual sources, businesses can gain valuable insights into consumer sentiments, preferences and behaviors.
Additionally, leveraging AI surveys can provide valuable insights into consumer preferences and behavior, further enriching the analysis process. These surveys can efficiently sift through large volumes of data, uncovering nuanced patterns and trends that might otherwise go unnoticed, thus enhancing the depth and accuracy of consumer behavior analysis.
You could also set up a Google My Business profile to gather insights from customer reviews, local search behavior and demographic data. This can provide valuable information about how your brand is perceived locally and help tailor marketing strategies accordingly.
As with any data-driven approach, more data leads to stronger insights, and AI customer experience analysis tools can dig through vast datasets to find the insights that matter to you.
Analyze captured data against established goals
The final stage is to ruthlessly analyze the captured data against our established goals and customer segments to inform future marketing and product adjustments. AI-powered analysis is effective and quick to work with through third-party services and can drastically reduce the time and manpower needed to find the story in the numbers.
Any measurements need to be done with a proposed action in mind. It’s no use simply learning something about your product or service if nothing is going to be actioned from the findings, and you should commit to making at least one change from any finding – positive or negative. Whether this is an adjustment of marketing copy to highlight a product feature or to put a new product in the pipeline to resolve a currently unmet demand, always have a response to measured data.
Bridging the gap between brand and consumer
Consumer behavior analysis can bridge the gap between a brand and its customers, helping to foster a positive relationship between the two and build long-term success and a loyal audience. It’s a powerful tool that can support a range of marketing activities, including CX and UX optimization, marketing message creation, and even product research and ideation.
When you commit to improving the experience of your customers, you are sending a message that you’re a consumer-first brand. We’re too accustomed to an oppositional interaction – businesses digging to get a customer’s money – but effective consumer behavior analysis flips that script and works to make their experience better.
Be confident when making changes and don’t be afraid to try new things, measure the results and try again.