Now that you have a comprehensive understanding of what drives consumer behaviour, this topic will look at how you can bring this knowledge together to analyse consumer behaviour.
By the end of this Topic, you will understand:
- The digital tools that will assist you in analysing consumer behaviour
- Qualitative research methods
- The consumer research process
- How to conduct a consumer behaviour analysis
Before we begin watch this video explaining the neuroscience of branding and how it affects customers.
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Digital footprints
If you go to just about any website these days, you will be asked to accept or decline a warning about website cookies.
Cookies are text files with small pieces of data that are used to identify your computer as you use a website or computer network. It is these cookies that are used to track an internet user’s journey across the internet, create a digital footprint and are a marketer’s treasure trove of data that can tell you so much about your consumers’ needs.
These cookies are what sites like Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Insights and your email automation tool will rely on to give you invaluable data for your consumer analysis.
A crucial component of being a great marketer is ensuring that your analytics and metrics tools are set up correctly. Without your tracking and metrics tools set up, you really don’t have your tools of the trade.
To analyse consumer behaviour, you need data. The data that you collect will be both qualitative and quantitative in nature.
Some of the essential data and metrics tools you will need for analysing consumer data are detailed below.
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Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a crucial tool for marketers that lets companies measure advertising and marketing return on investment (ROI) and lets you track page views and visitors; link uses; and use tracking codes among other uses.
It is used by installing a piece of code onto your organisation’s website that corresponds with the code from your Google Analytics account and once this is done correctly, Google can track your website traffic on a live 'dashboard'. Marketers can use this information to see what pages are popular, what links are working, whether blog pages are being visited, if visitors are staying on pages for long, and much more.
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Watch this video called What is Google Analytics? by Create a Pro Website to learn more.
Not only are organisations now capturing customer data from online activity, they’re also analysing and drawing insights from the activity. The data that this consumer activity provides can drive innovation through the detailed measurement of customer and market data that is more readily available in a digital worldMatt Glasner, General manager of Experian Marketing Services
Further Reading
Read this article called Top 11 most important Google Analytics metrics to track in 2020 by Derrick Weiss.
Facebook Audience Insights
If your organisation advertises on Facebook, Instagram or any other social media platform, be sure to use Facebook Audience Insights (see screen grab below). It is very similar to Google Analytics; however, it will tell you all about your business Facebook page which is very important if you are trying to build a following on that social media platform.
Email automation program
Most organisations that have a marketing department will have an email automation program of some description and the tools you have available to you for measuring consumer behaviour can become quite advanced in these programs. It will depend on the particular system you are using as to the specific features you have, but almost all programs will let you measure the following useful metrics:
- Open rate – this is as it sounds, the percentage of people who opened the email
- Click-through rate – the percentage of email recipients who clicked on unique clicks on a link from your email
- Unsubscribe rate – the percentage of contacts who unsubscribed from your list as a result of the email
- Complaint rate – this is the percentage of people who marked your email as 'spam'. You want to avoid these as much as possible. People are most likely to complain if you don’t include an unsubscribe link in your emails, if you email too frequently, if you send irrelevant content, or if you purchased an email list
- Conversion rate – the percentage of people who completed your desired action which might be purchasing a product or visiting your website. Many email programs allow you to set a goal that allows you to track what is counted as a conversion
- Bounce rate – the bounce rate is the percentage of people that didn’t have the email successfully delivered to their inbox.
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The data you collect from digital tools will be mostly quantitative data. There is also the opportunity to gather quantitative data and add this to the consumer analysis process.
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Qualitative Data describes qualities or characteristics. It is collected using questionnaires, interviews, or observation, and frequently appears in narrative form. For example, it could be notes taken during a focus group on the quality of the food at Cafe Mac, or responses from an open-ended questionnaire.
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Qualitative data research methods
| Surveys | Many organisations gather surveys from their clients at many touchpoints. These are often built into automations, sent out following an online checkout or after a service has been completed. |
|---|---|
| Informal feedback | Some organisations have a process by which informal feedback provided by consumers can be captured. This might be feedback provided over the phone or in person. Feedback might be recorded on a Feedback Register so that the organisation can use the comments for consumer analysis and improvement. |
| Focus groups | A focus group is a small group of consumers who come together to analyse a product or service and provide feedback to an organisation. It is usually representative of the wider population of the consumer group. A moderator facilitates the focus group to ensure discussion and open feedback among the members of the group. |
| One-to-one interviews or feedback | This is a conversational method of receiving feedback through open-ended questions. This method relies heavily on the expertise of the researcher asking the questions as they must be able to probe with relevant questions to gain as much insight as possible from the respondent. This is a time-consuming approach and is not often used on a wide scale. |
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What’s the difference between quantitative and qualitative data?
Quantitative
Can be measured and expressed with numbers
Qualitative
Categorised based on traits, qualities and characteristics
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The consumer research process can be broken down into the following steps:
- Identify why the research is being conducted
- What do you want to find out?
- What do you need to understand about your consumers?
- Many organisations will have a set of metrics they regularly measure about their consumers on a regular basis
- Collect secondary data first
- Secondary data is the data collected from data sources like Google Analytics, your email system and other sources
- This helps identify if data is already on hand and if there are any pieces of information already available that can be used to make decisions about further research
- Collect the primary data - this is the data that comes directly from the person or user
- Data is analysed and collected to understand consumer behaviour
- A report is prepared
A Customer Behaviour Analysis, also called a Consumer Behaviour Analysis, is a qualitative and quantitative look at how customers interact with your company. A Customer Behaviour Analysis considers the different customer segments a company has by grouping them by their common characteristics. A customer journey map is then created for each group.
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A Customer Behaviour Analysis considers the different customer segments a company has by grouping them by their common characteristics.
A customer behaviour analysis provides valuable insight to the various factors that influence each group of customers. It helps you analyse motives, priorities and decision-making methods as well as helping to identify whether your marketing strategies are working, or to develop new marketing strategies, as needed.
Buyer personas
The best marketing strategies are built on buyer personas which are based on different groups of your buyers. Buyer personas represent your ideal customers and are created by getting to know your target market intimately and writing up a profile of who the target customer is. Think about location, age, income, job title, hobbies, interests, priorities and so.
Once you have your buyer personas, it makes it easier to think about developing a journey for that persona and thinking about that persona when you are planning your marketing.
Two examples of Customer Journey Maps
| Buyer’s Journey | Awareness Stage | Consideration Stage | Decision Stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is the customer thinking or feeling? | |||
| What is the customer’s action? | |||
| What or where is the buyer researching? | |||
| How will we move the buyer along their journey with us in mind? |
Lead Nurturing Customer Journey Map
| Buyer’s Journey | Stranger | Subscriber/Lead | More Qualified Lead | Opportunity/Demo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| What is the lead thinking, feeling or doing? | ||||
| Who is the lead speaking to from the company? | ||||
| What content from the company is the lead receiving? | ||||
| What can we do to expedite this process? | ||||
| What can we do to make the lead more comfortable with decision making? |
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Next watch this video explaining consumer behaviour whilst integrating AI to predict future outcomes.
