Thalia Rodriguez, Author at PivotPath

Why Consumer Behavior Is Essential to Marketing Research

Did you know that in most cases, customer loyalty is worth more than the price of a single purchase? That is because marketers are fervent to meet the needs of their customers at a high degree. How do marketers make that happen? Well, one thing to consider is that marketers continuously do research on consumer behavior. Yes, you want to sell a product, but adding value to your customers’ lives hits one out of the park.

Consumer behavior is all around us and it is important to know what drives us to purchase a product.

First, every organization should understand the power behind their research on consumer behavior before launching any product. Knowing your audience is important to tailor your buyer persona. Before making any final decisions on how you would market your products or services, your understanding of your target market should be secure.

In that case, keeping consumer behavior as your main focus on marketing research is essential to understand customers’ buying decisions and how they look at products.

Additionally, conducting research on consumer behavior will provide better ideas on your marketing strategies to move ahead of your competitors. Keeping consumer behavior in mind when studying your marketing analytics reports is vital to meet the expectations of your customers.

Three main factors that influence consumer behavior are cultural, psychological, and personal factors. Incorporating these three points into your consumer behavior research will help you gain valuable information, and understand who your potential customers will be. Here’s how conducting research on consumer behavior helps you with your overall marketing strategy.

1. Helps Refine Marketing Strategy Analytics

When it comes to marketing decisions, analytics is an influential factor when determining if your strategies are helping to push your company forward. Doing research on the performance of your display ads, website content, and search ads can tell you a lot about what your customers are engaged in.

Also, the analytics of your website shows how consumer behavior affects search engine optimization. Research on consumer behavior is crucial to acknowledge if your consumers are responding positively to what you wish to market.

2. Expands Your Awareness on Globalization

The study of consumer behavior is vital if you decide to expand your product or services to non-domestic markets. In addition, conducting marketing research on those who have different cultural backgrounds is essential for your business. This shows if your product or services best serve the cultural norms and values of a particular country. Applying this type of research to your marketing strategy will make you stand out from your competitors.

Learning about consumer behavior in foreign markets will expand your awareness of helping reach non-domestic needs.

3. Gives You a Better Outlook on Customer Preferences to Design Your Marketing Mix

Understanding your consumers’ preferences on a particular product provides a narrower scope to design your marketing mix (the four P’s).

When conducting research, a consumer may be interested in the design of the product yet may shy away from purchasing it due to the product’s high-end price. Or, selling a beach-like product in Southern California may reach more sales than selling the product in Eastern Texas. Acknowledging this type of behavior provides a better outlook on how to better your pricing strategy. Here are some questions to consider when correlating your marketing mix to consumer behavior.

Does the price of your product match the income of your target market?
Does the design of your product attract the audience whom you wish to target?
Is the product marketed in locations where people would wish to buy the product?
Is the product useful and/or is it in demand to solve a problem in the market?

When customers decide to buy your product, it is essential to grasp their thought processes when they make their final purchasing decisions. By doing so, you will know the types of strategies that will work to boost sales.

Where should you begin to collect research on consumer behavior?

Create an appropriate survey design that will best gather your consumer insight data. Are you gathering data based on your participants’ responses towards your product and/or service? Use a rating scale question from 1 to 100.

Are you gathering data based on your participants’ feelings or opinions on your product and/or service? Use a Likert scale question such as “strongly agree to strongly disagree”.

Be sure to include demographic questions (age, income, race/ethnicity, gender, occupation, location, etc). This will help you better understand the demographics of your participants, and it gives you sharper information on how it correlates with consumer behavior. Also, you can determine how a product’s usefulness correlates with the needs of a particular demographic.

Conduct an online survey through your website or conduct a face-to-face survey of a focus group.

If you decide to resort to an inexpensive and quicker route to gather more information on customer experience, you can conduct online surveys through your website. In most cases, conducting online surveys will only provide you with anonymous participants which hinders you from gathering specific demographic data. With that said, utilize online surveys for your current customers to uncover what they think about your products and/or services so far.

To gain a thorough analysis of your product/service research, conducting a focus group on your customers or tailored buyer personas is the best way to analyze and gather consumer insights. Focus group research allows you to gather more information from your participants because it takes more time to gather data from their in-depth interviews.

76% of consumers expect businesses to understand their expectations and needs.

Conducting surveys of your current customers or groups that show interest in your product is vital to understand when wanting to meet the needs of your consumers. At the end of the day, your mission is to add value to your customers’ lives. This can only happen by taking time to learn more about your customers. Taking the extra mile to know more about your customers will reap good benefits to maintain your overall business health and gain loyal customers.

Thalia Rodriguez is a Communications major with a double minor in marketing and professional writing at Grand Canyon University. When she’s not practicing writing, she can be spending time with family and friends, going on hikes, or cooking delicious plant-based dishes. Check out her LinkedIn profile here to connect.

5 Ways on How Podcasts Can Boost Your Brand

by Thalia Rodriguez

This year, about 155 million people listen to podcasts every week. Podcasts are transforming how people gain and retain information. You can listen to podcasts while exercising, driving to work, or simply listening for leisure. Now that you have that in mind, it is important to understand how this form of digital marketing can boost your brand.

What is a Podcast?

A podcast is an audio program that consists of a series of episodes that discuss a particular topic. For instance, that can range from either lifestyle, religion, politics, social sciences, etc. You can subscribe and listen to a podcast on your phone either through headphones, through speakers, or in your car.

Developing connections with host speakers build your credibility when using podcasts.

Many podcasts are quite familiar with how they sound due to their conversation-like style of speaking about a focused topic. Digital marketing continues to rise with the use of social media, videography, and SEO. In fact, podcasts are reshaping the art of storytelling by showing audiences that conversations are powerful. They are designed from an idea or passion to draw attention and inspiration. Essentially, implementing podcasts into your marketing strategy can help gain more prospects for your business and boost your brand awareness.

So, what should you consider when choosing to go on a podcast platform?

Before creating any type of marketing strategy, it is important to identify your buyer persona.

What are their personal interests?
What do they need to know about your business’s missions and values?
How will podcasts help serve your customers’ needs when they engage in your content?
Why would they want to listen to your content?

Identifying and researching the characteristics of your buyer persona is vital when crafting a podcast to ensure that your content will be engaging and beneficial to your audience and to generate leads.

So how do podcasts boost your brand?

1. Helps Personalize Your Brand

Inevitably, your main pursuit when beginning to create your podcast is to build relationships with your customers – which includes building trust. Uploading an informative series relating to your products and services helps your audience get a better understanding of your brand’s personality. Also, podcasts help represent who you are to the world. Podcasts are highly engaging which breaks the monotony of overloaded information.

You can break the monotony of overloaded information by allowing guest speakers onto your platform to discuss topics that represent your brand.

Podcasts are highly interactive because they convey a simpler and direct message to your audience with the means of storytelling altogether.

2. Grows Thought Leadership

When delivering a message to your audience about your experience as an entrepreneur, it is vital to establish credibility on how you have executed your passions. Podcasts are beneficial to grow you as a thought leader when sharing your insights to your audience. Conveying topical information to your audience that is tied with well-researched evidence of building your business shows that you are able to provide helpful resources for your audience.

Podcasts create relatability between hosts and the audience.

3. Builds Consistency and Awareness for Your Brand

Implementing podcasts for your brand creates a sense of community and awareness about where you stand to make your community a better place. When presenting your content, your audience connects to the authenticity you display to them. That said, using podcasts helps build a relational connection with your brand. Adding podcasts to your marketing strategy boosts your brand awareness by clearly having your voice heard about your passions for your business and customers.

4. It’s a Growing Media Platform

In light of the COVID-19 circumstances, many companies are resorting to audio and video platforms for their audiences to learn more about who they represent, and to educate their audiences on their missions as a business. Since podcasts are another medium of digital marketing, you can use them as an alternative for storytelling. Hypothetically speaking, say if your business does not have the equipment to shoot a professional video, using podcasts is an inexpensive approach to distribute your storytelling content. This is done by using high-quality audio software to record your “conversation-like” content. You can then promote episodes through a variety of distribution channels such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

5. It’s Simple to Setup

Setting up a podcast is not complicated, thank goodness. To set one up, all you need is great WiFi, high-quality earphones/headphones and a microphone, and a good audio editing software.

Second, create cover art and clickable subject lines that appeal to your audience when they are searching for topics to listen to.

Last, outline a decent and organized script that sounds conversational, relaxed, and informative. Not only are these steps simple, but they are also inexpensive when you are branching out a new marketing strategy to promote your brand.

It is important to understand how podcasts have grown through the use of smartphones.

As technology continues to advance, it cannot eliminate the human element of connecting with your audience. Using podcasts boosts your brand to appeal to your audience personally which lets you focus on why conversations matter. Using podcasts effectively helps execute your goals to serve your prospects, customers, and audiences altogether.

Discover how PivotPath can boost your brand identity with its brand strategy development here.

Your audience is the heartbeat of building your business success. Reaching them through a portable and mobile-friendly medium boosts your brand and grows your target audience demographic. Inevitably, how you sound to your audience makes a lasting impact on how your brand is perceived. Expand your research on podcasts to see if it can best fit your marketing strategy needs, to become a better storyteller and thought leader for your audience.

Why Branding Should Be the Focus of Your Social Media

by Thalia Rodriguez

In the world that we live in today, almost all businesses use social media channels to promote their brand. What are some social media channels you utilize that build your brand awareness? Are you using them effectively? Using social media to grow your business helps consumers remember you and your brand based on what you present to them. This is why understanding the tools of different social media platforms help you to focus on letting your audience know who you are and what your business stands for.

Watch the video for tips!

Social media is a vital tool to get the word out about your business.

Inevitably, social media is the heartbeat of our digital marketing world. Thus, marketers use social media to increase brand awareness and grow their consumer base at an accelerated rate. Your business thrives on what your customers perceive about you. That said, how you design and present yourself through social media is a key factor in how customers will remember your brand.

How can you use social media to know who’s interested in your brand?

First, it is important to establish your marketing goals before thinking too ahead of your social media presence. It is important to understand the “why” behind your social media platforms because this will impact your overall brand. Here are some useful benefits of using social media.

Measures your key performance indicators (KPI).
Gives you a platform to connect to your growing audience.
Provides user-generated content.

These are a few tips on how social media can measure your consumer base as you execute your marketing goals. In addition, they help serve you to bring awareness of what is trending on the market.

How can you use social media to promote your brand?

Be active on social media.

When using social media, it is imperative that you are consistent with the content that you post. Posting on a daily basis tells your customers and audience that you are active and it makes you stand out from your competition. No one wants to follow a business that rarely posts content let alone interact with its consumers. Also, being active daily gives the opportunity for consumers to reach out through direct messaging. They can reach out on anything regarding their consumer needs/wants and questions about your products or services. Choosing to be attentive to your customers’ needs will help set you apart from your competitors.

Grow your consumer base by answering their questions on social media.

Focus on how your design attracts consumers.

What attracts a consumer, when scrolling through a business’s social media page is its design. Your design should ultimately represent what you are selling to your audience. It has been proclaimed by interior designers, artists, and color psychologists that color absolutely affects moods.

Does your color scheme match your brand’s values?
What type of mood or emotions do you want to demonstrate to your brand?
Does the design complement the mood of your social media page?

In short, these are a few questions to consider when forming the layout of your social media pages. Consider how your business’s values can influence your graphic designs on social media.

So, why should you focus your branding on social media platforms?

We live in a world where we are constantly connected to many different networks. In the business world, social media networks are a valuable asset to build on your communications with prospective buyers. In this case, using multiple social media platforms helps build your brand identity so that other networks notice your business.

Having a strong social media presence establishes credibility.

When a consumer is looking into buying anything of good quality, it is important that factors of trust are established between the business and consumer to influence the purchase of that product or service. That said, having a professional presence on social media establishes credibility on your end as a business.

Standing to your missions and values and actively participating in those factors are noticed by whom you are trying to reach. When posting content for your audience, remember that you are also representing your company’s values. So, everything that you demonstrate through your social media platforms represents your organization’s efforts and overall brand.

Having a strong social media presence makes your brand recognizable.

Today, some brands that are recognizable in social media are GoPro, Nike, and Spotify. They implement effective strategies on each of their social media platforms that influence their consumers’ future spending habits. Here are a few tips on how to make your brand more recognizable to various audiences:

Use multiple accounts for different audiences.
Do research on which platform is geared towards different age groups.
Choose one platform that can build on customer service.
Again, stay consistent with your social media accounts.
Tailor your tone and voice that fit different social media platforms.

Did you know that 81% of small and medium businesses use social media platforms?

Knowing the similarities and differences of each social media platform gives you strong awareness of whom you should reach that fits your buyer personas. In the world that we live in today, social media networks are one of the fastest-growing industries. It’s important that your business uses social media to gain the following network. We access information at our fingertips which revolutionizes how we perceive our networks. Posting sharable and valuable content helps your audience understand what you stand for. By doing so, it helps create lasting connections with your consumers that increase creative and effective strategies based on what your customers want out of your social media pages.

Check PivotPath’s services on how we can boost your social media branding.

Always strive to learn different effective marketing strategies that increase your brand awareness in an influential and impactful way.

How Affirmations Can Help Your Business Succeed

by Thalia Rodriguez

Did you know that how you think can influence what you put into action? This is definitely relevant in the business world where thoughts, ideas, and emotions are heavily impactful on how you perceive the value and success of your company. The words that we harness reflect what we think about our marketing strategies and visions for our business. Speaking positive and motivational affirmations to yourself on a daily basis builds a successful business mindset.

What are affirmations?

Affirmations are short, simple, and powerful expressions to evoke positive behavior into our habits, thinking patterns, and environments. When the affirming phrases are being repeated, they automatically depict mental images that are made in the subconscious which in return changes behavior. Hence, practicing affirmations helps strengthen your business mindset to act on your plans effectively and successfully.

For affirmations to be effective, it is important that the phrases have meaning, intention, and are spoken repeatedly multiple times a day. When repeating affirmations for thirty days, it produces a new habit for you to apply to your lifestyle. Understanding the effectiveness of affirmations helps you strengthen your core business values and passions that you are pursuing.

Positive Business Affirmations

I succeed with ease. I succeed with grace.
My passions enable me to keep moving forward.
What I did today is better than yesterday.
My thoughts lead me to the success I desire.
I love what I do and it shows by serving my customers.
My business goals are serving my community well.
I am making a difference with my business.
I am investing in myself and my business daily.
What I offer as a product/service is what people want/need.
I am growing to become a better entrepreneur.

How do affirmations help strengthen a business’s values?

First of all, it is vital that small business owners do not lose sight of the values and the truths of their business when building their brand. In other words, ideas and choices should mirror the values of what the business stands for in order to serve customers well. Whatever an entrepreneur chooses to believe about their business, it will stimulate the corresponding action.

In the business world, technology is increasing at an exponential rate. It is imperative that entrepreneurs stick to what they believe about their business to evolve with the digital age. Importantly, entrepreneurs will face hardships and failures in a changing business world. Hence it is vital that they persevere and adapt in any circumstance.

Again, affirmations help entrepreneurs stay above water by reverting to why they began their business in the first place. If you have a solid belief system about your business, you are able to find solutions that will strengthen your business operations. Essentially, affirmations evoke empowering beliefs about who you are and it promotes a vision of your business when facing difficult times.

So, you have a solid understanding of business-related affirmations, how does it build strategy?

Using affirmations effectively helps you steward your values and passions in the right direction for your business. With that in mind, it is important to implement your values when communicating with your customers about a certain product or service. One marketing strategy that benefits from communicating values to customers is through storytelling.

How do you want to connect with your audience in an authentic way?

For businesses to thrive, they need to connect with their audiences and customers. The art of storytelling helps customers resonate with the values that a brand promotes. Affirmations play a key role in effective storytelling because it shows what the business believes by what they put into action.

Why are beliefs important to marketing strategy?

Today, companies such as Nike and Apple succeed at promoting their values to their customers by using a shared belief system that appeals to its target audiences. Customers gravitate towards businesses that carry the same values into their lifestyles. Importantly, marketers and entrepreneurs need to genuinely communicate what they stand for through the marketing channels they use.

As an entrepreneur, whatever you stand and affirm by will greatly influence your beliefs on your business and the types of customers that will gravitate towards your beliefs. Effective storytelling helps a business’s target market understand and connect with the brand at a personal level.

How do affirmations emphasize success and action?

Now that you understand how affirmations tie with building strategy, it is up to you as an entrepreneur to sharpen your personal values and mission for your business. Writing down your affirmations helps beat self-sabotaging and negative thoughts that may be hindering your business’s success. Harnessing positive thinking is vital to move forward and move past obstacles in your business ventures. So, what you think molds your perception of reality.

Positive thinking helps your business to grow and execute your goals.

Here are a few points to consider when sticking to your affirmations.

Remember what your values are.
Reflect on why your business matters to you and your community.
You are in control of how you steward your thoughts.
Discipline is essential to affirm your goals.
Your values and beliefs reflect how you will market your product/service.

Words carry so much power by how you operate on a daily basis.

In order for good marketing to continue, it is important that your business/organization stands by what you value and why you are serving those values to their consumers. Also, when obstacles arise businesses need to face them headstrong with their values in place. It is evident that affirming phrases will help keep business owners resilient on the “why” behind their company. Affirmations are a useful tool to build a successful business mindset that produces rewarding benefits for your business. Understanding and most importantly believing that your business is succeeding wins half the battle to keep your business operating. Now, give yourself time to reflect on your business goals and use that reflecting time to speak truths on how you will serve your customers best.

How Can Artificial Intelligence (AI) Improve Marketing?

by Thalia Rodriguez

Did you know that 23% of businesses use artificial intelligence (AI) into their services? AI is one of the greatest innovations in marketing while enabling the ability to quickly meet your customers’ needs.

AI improves user interaction and the personalized experience.

It is evident that AI provides many research opportunities that go beyond what the human mind can absorb. It seeks information about different marketing segments at a specific time range. Also, AI is the development of multiple computer systems that require human intelligence. It computes and navigates algorithms that foster problem-solving skills, visual perception, speech recognition, and translation between languages.

There are many benefits of AI and how it improves business-to-consumer (B2C) experience. AI allows businesses to market more effectively and efficiently. Here are a few points to consider:

AI helps businesses build their marketing strategies at a simpler yet effective rate.
It helps answer marketing’s most complex questions.
It serves customers to have more control over what they want to search on a web page.

Digital Platforms that Implement AI Boost the Marketing and User Experience

The internet has revolutionized society by enabling individuals to have access to unlimited amounts of information. This broadens the door to global communication and ultimately changing how consumers and businesses communicate. Before getting into the heart of AI, it is important to understand how digital platforms evolved marketing strategies.

In the business world, the internet has transformed distribution into an e-commerce industry. This is where people can easily navigate and purchase items online. This also includes recommendations, web design, and customer interaction when users are new to an e-commerce website.

How Can AI Increase User Experience (UX)?

In today’s digital world, capturing the attention of consumers is of the utmost importance. With the introduction of AI, marketers can create personalized experiences for potential leads. For example, on a business website, design teams can implement user experience (UX) technologies such as personalized landing pages or heat mapping.

AI is enhancing websites to become more valuable and more personal for users than ever before. AI’s goal is to provide complete control for the user. Better control shows sharper preferences on social media platforms and the influence of their future spending choices.

The marketer has complete control over how an algorithm will advance their website’s tracking efforts.

AI goes beyond search history, saved sites, and the like of a post that will lead users to view similar posts. In addition, AI helps boost marketing by improving search engine optimization (SEO). By boosting SEO, it helps businesses target their buyer persona. Also, AI uses speech recognition and content recommendations to better personalize UX. Today, users see AI take over in many of their social media platforms. For instance, ads that correlate with their likes and/or interests on a certain topic or product of their choice is a branch of AI. There are a few points to consider in which AI is transforming how we see marketing-related topics.

1. AI Personalizes Pages and Recommendations

In this day and age, many consumers prefer to have a more personalized user experience. Rather than taking more time to search the web page for an answer, users want answers that are quick and reliable. AI is a useful tool for many well-known companies since it predicts the spending habits of its customers.

For example, Amazon uses AI to tailor specific preferences of a consumer based on their previous spending habits. This generating tool helps customers have a simpler and quicker browsing time when purchasing products.

So next time you are browsing on Amazon, your customized experience is all due to AI

Essentially, when marketers implement AI into their marketing strategy the end goal is to reach the needs of the user based on their preferences.

2. AI Pursues Customer Interactions: Chat Rooms

Understanding the needs of your customers is vital for the productivity of your business. Chat rooms are more prevalent on many websites because it creates a more interactive and user-oriented experience. AI revolutionizes chat rooms that provide essential information to answer a user’s questions. AI pulls information through its installed algorithms that can provide automatic responses to FAQs.

Businesses can benefit from this tactic because it builds trust between the user and the website. For instance, the needs of a user include that they are being heard and taken into account to help their purchasing decisions on a website.

The bottom line is that your business needs to ensure a user’s trust. Your business can tailor an algorithm that provides helpful answers for users while assisting them in making essential purchasing decisions.

How Does AI Improve Marketing Research?

AI improves marketing research by saving time and money by helping marketing researchers perform their jobs more efficiently. AI saves time by using algorithms to create a data analysis of consumer needs.

With generated natural-learning processes that are implemented in AI, marketing researchers have a sharper scope on their marketing research. By having a sharper scope, it provides a better understanding of who the target market is. When having sharper information about a certain segment, it helps marketers build better marketing strategies that best fit the segment’s needs.

AI quickens marketing research at an effective rate.

How Does AI Improve Pricing Strategy?

Also, it is important to note that AI helps predict dynamic pricing. This helps marketing researchers to understand better strategies when it comes to product pricing and placement that best fits their tailored persona. Knowing what users and consumers wish to buy is important to build your business brand and increase profit.

In order for AI to thrive in tomorrow’s leading innovation, it is important to understand how algorithms are either benefiting or hindering your marketing efforts. The goal of pursuing AI is to ensure that it will be a useful tool to advance customer experience and business relationships. With that in mind, implementing useful technology such as AI serves as a useful tool to strengthen your business’s goals to better your customers’ needs.