Conducting research is a vital part of any successful business. With it, leadership can make smart business decisions on topics like:
- What to spend money on
- How to improve business processes
- Which channels to advertise on
- What kinds of products and services to create/improve
Using a market research insights platform will allow you to learn a lot about your industry, your customers, and the success of your marketing campaigns. The right platform will also provide you with target market research tools to better understand consumer behavior of both current and prospective customers. Know your customer, and you will experience a lot more success in the long haul.
Why does understanding your customers’ behavior matter so much, and how does research help with this, exactly? We provide answers to those questions in this blog. Before you can understand the importance of consumer behavior, though, you must first know what consumer behavior is.
What Is Consumer Behavior in Marketing?
Consumer behavior is the analysis of what your customers’ needs and wants are and how they satisfy those needs through their purchasing habits. In this process, you’ll learn about how they choose what to purchase and what they do once they’ve finished using the products or services.
Consumer behavior is affected by four main types of factors:
- Personal: Includes a person’s age, relationship status, financial background, and job
- Psychological: Describes a person’s own motivations and their views on particular products, services, and brands
- Social: Encompasses the influences that family, friends, and social groups have on a person’s buying habits
- Cultural: Covers factors such as religion, geographic location, nationality, and ethnicity
A person’s background has a huge impact on what they choose to spend their money on. And since most people base their decisions on their emotions rather than logic, you truly have to understand what drives consumers to be successful in your marketing or product development efforts. That’s where the consumer research process comes in.
What Is the Role of Research in Consumer Behavior?
The role of research in consumer behavior is to understand what your prospective customers want and what influences them to make the decisions they do so that you can meet their needs. Research is especially important when consumer behaviors continue to evolve based on the economy and trends. It will help you keep up with these changes so you can ensure your products and services still appeal to your target market.
It’s important to note that there may be differences between the consumer and the shopper behavior—and they may not necessarily be the same person. For example, think about food items targeted towards young children. While the consumers are toddlers, the purchasers are typically the parents or caretakers.
Several consumer behavior research methods exist that will help your business better understand your consumers and/or shoppers, and their habits. One such method is online surveys. Asking the right customer research questions will give you the answers you need to more effectively market to each group. Your surveys should reach a wide audience—but still one within your target market—and provide you with the most accurate, non-duplicative, complete information possible. With PureSpectrum, they can.
Our platform allows you to send out surveys that will reach your target audience in over 60 countries. Once sent, PureSpectrum’s technology will ensure that each response is unique and that you can access data as it appears in real time. Conducting your research with our solution will give you a more complete and accurate understanding of consumer behavior. Our insights help you synthesize data to better generate your own conclusions.
Why Is It Important for Marketers to Understand Consumer Behavior?
The importance of consumer research as it pertains to consumer behavior boils down to making smart business decisions and growing revenue. How does it do that? In a few key ways:
- It puts you in the minds of your customers. You learn what they want and what they’re willing to spend to satisfy that need or desire.
- Once you know what your customers want, you can focus on creating products and services that really matter to them. Plus, it will guide you on deciding where and how to market to your target audience.
- As you better satisfy the needs of your target audience, your company will grow. Satisfied customers will tell friends and colleagues about your offerings, which will bring you even more business.
- It minimizes your risk. If you know what your audience wants, you have less chance of failing than if you try to guess at what they want.
- It narrows your focus. The more research and business you do, the more information you’ll have on who you want to target with your marketing. This, in turn, will grow your return on investment and save your business money since you won’t be throwing dollars at audiences who don’t want or need your offerings.
To truly know your customers, you need to use several different research methods. This will provide you with lots of information in different forms. Conducting surveys is one of the methods you should consider because you can learn about your customer’s spending habits directly from them. With PureSpectrum, you’ll receive reliable responses quickly.
Understand Your Customers’ Behavior Using PureSpectrum
The easiest way to understand your customers’ behavior is to ask them. PureSpectrum gives you the capability to ask high-quality, relevant respondents your pressing business questions. All respondents go through several points of verification to ensure legitimacy and maintain quality. As respondents submit their answers, results will appear in real time on the Insights platform. From there, you can easily visualize and download your data to present to your leadership team and take action. Plus, if you have any questions along the way, our dedicated account team is available to assist you. Using PureSpectrum you know you will get high quality data, because of our industry-leading respondent scoring system, PureScoreTM is designed to prevent fraudulent or low-quality respondents from taking the survey.
To learn more about how PureSpectrum can help you gain insight into consumer behavior, schedule a demo.