How to Analyze Consumer Behavior and Increase Your Revenue (FREE Report)

My company, Jamal's Cookies, has a big problem. We have no idea what our customers are thinking. This has led to a huge decrease in sales. And honestly, my boss isn't too happy about it. But I've got an ace up my sleeve. By leveraging this one key strategy, I think I can save my company from bankruptcy. It's called Consumer behavior analysis. And by the end of this video, you you'll understand how to analyze consumer behaviors through surveys and focus groups and leverage those insights to drive revenue. And I'll still have my job, hopefully. So let's define what consumer behavior is. Consumer behavior is the study of how people make purchasing decisions to meet their needs. Those decisions are driven by a bunch of factors like how much disposable income you have, how many of your basic needs are met if this purchase is recommended by a friend or family. So with consumer behavior analysis, your you're collecting and analyzing data on your audience to better understand why they're hitting that buy button. And here's the thing with consumer behavior, it's always changing. Our 2023 Consumer Trends Report tells you a lot about how customer behavior is changing everything from shopping on social media to data privacy concerns. Check it out in the description below. For example, in 2023, we saw a huge increase of consumers preference in shopping on social media compared to other channels. In May 2022, our Consumer Trends Report found that only 12% preferred purchasing products through social media apps like Instagram Shop or Facebook Marketplace. This year, that percentage shot up to 41%. Having these insights is so valuable to have as a business because it can impact your entire strategy. Now let's get into ways to gather and analyze consumer behavior data. You can learn from your audience through surveys, focus groups, social media review sites, and even your competitors. Let's dig deeper into surveys. They're great. Two reasons it doesn't cost much to set one up. And you can limit your respondents to the exact audience you're interested in learning about. So at Jamal's Cookies, we want to survey our customers. Most of our customers are canceling their monthly cookie subscription, which is our main revenue driver, and we can't figure out why. We're pretty confident in the quality of our cookies, so there must be something else happening. We have a few theories, but we'll use the survey to get to the root of of the issue. So first let's write up our questions. Let's select our audience. We're going to send the survey to customers who have purchased from us in the last six months, pulling that list from our CRM. We're going to navigate to service, then Feedback Survey, and then click on Create Survey. I'm going to use this template from HubSpot as a jumping off point for the questions I want to ask. I'm going to ask my audience, why? Are you trying to get me fired? No, I'm going to ask my audience rate how easy it is to place your cookie order right every month. Asking that will get me closer to understanding why customers aren't keeping their subscriptions. Next, I want to ask what's the best and worst part of ordering Jamal's cookies? This will give me valuable insight into what areas of our customer experience to lean into more and which ones should be adjusted. I'm also going to ask what do you value most in our product and what can we do to improve your experience with us? To drill down into the customer experience, there's no hard or fast rule when it comes to survey length. You can send out a survey with one question or 100 questions, but of course, the shorter the list, the higher the odds your respondents will complete the survey. From there, all that's left to do is deciding how to deliver our email and when. And now we wait for the results. I'll see you in a little bit. Okay, we got our survey results and we finally got some insight into where we were going wrong. Here are some responses to our questions. The main piece of feedback was that our customers found our order process clunky and confusing. Also, our customers hated that they had to add payment information in every time they place an order. That's a bit of a boo boo. Now that we know this, we can go back to our web and product teams to optimize our checkout process. With that handled, let's switch gears to another method. Focus Groups A focus group works by getting together a group of six to 10 people made up of your target audience to ask them questions about your products and services. Unlike in a survey, with a focus group you can ask follow up questions and get real time feedback. There are two ways to set up a focus group. You can set it up internally or work with a market research company like Gartner, Ipso or Forster. First, you have to recruit your participants. Start by reaching out to some of your most loyal customers as they're more likely to agree to participate. You should also include folks who haven't interacted with your product but fall within your target market to find them. Consider reaching out to community groups within your target market. For example, say you run a fitness e commerce brand you could reach out to a few community groups for marathon runners or bodybuilders. Advertising on social media is another effective and free recruitment method and be ready to offer incentives for participation. This can be in the form of products or services, gift cards or cold hard cash. In our case, we're just giving away half eaten cookie bits Once you have your participants, it's time to prepare your questions and discussion prompts. When crafting your questions, you should have a specific goal in mind. What insights are you looking to gain from your research? You could be looking understand your customer's motivation for purchasing, or you might want to know why they might choose a competitor's product over yours. Knowing your end goal will shape the questions you ask. From there, you can organize them on a questionnaire. You can use this template by HubSpot or Business Makeover. Make sure to leave room below each question to take notes based on the feedback from your participants. Next, appoint a moderator and an observer note taker. Your observer note taker will look for major themes in the discussion and write down ideas. Your moderator is there to drive the conversation and keep folks talking. After the session, your team should spend the next few days going over the information you collected and discussing them. This entire process can take anywhere from a few weeks to months once you factor in recruiting, scheduling and reviewing. If you're looking for a less time consuming and zero cost method, opt for social listening. This involves scanning social media to find any mentions of your product and or market and analyze the data. Whether it's a form on Quora or a comment section under a TikTok video, this qualitative method may give you a general sense of consumer sentiment. You might discover issues customers are having, considerations before purchase, and more. As a business owner, you might think your value comes from one thing and you find out through research like this that it comes from somewhere else. You can then readapt your messaging to highlight the features your customers love the most. The downside of this method is that you may be getting data from consumers that don't match your user Persona and there's not a clear follow up strategy. But it's a good place to start if you have limited resources and want to better understand your audience. Now if you're looking for quantitative data, analyze things like your consumer's order history and interaction with your brand. How many times does a consumer typically visit your site before making a purchase and when they do? What pages do they visit the most? How often do they make the purchases? Is there a pattern to when they purchase certain products? When you take all of those valuable consumer insights and use them to inform your marketing strategy. That's called consumer centric approach. Some businesses take on a product centric approach. They focus on building amazing products that will organically attract their target market. Companies like Apple and Dyson max a subscription. With a consumer centric model, you're putting the needs of your customers first. Think of businesses like Trader Joe's and Chewy's. Both approaches can be super successful and a consumer centric strategy puts your customer at the center, which can lead to better results. One way to integrate your insights into your consumer centric marketing strategy is by focusing on one insight to create a smart goal. Say that you discover your website visitors are bouncing at a high rate because your blog posts aren't answering your consumer's questions. You can set the following goal Increase website traffic by 15% in six months by conducting SEO research to identify one relevant topic cluster and publishing 10 articles within that cluster. All that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time bound. I'm sure you're thinking all this is super cool, Jamal, but does this actually translate to real life? Yes. Here's an example that actually blew my mind. When Proctor and Gamble first launched Febreze, they thought it would be an instant hit. An odorless spray that gets rid of bad smells. I mean, who doesn't want that? You know what I'm saying? And that's the messaging they use in their campaigns. One ad followed a woman's journey complaining of the smell of cigarette smoke on her clothing every time she visited a specific cafe. But here was some breeze to save the day. Yay. To the surprise of P&G's marketing and sales teams, the product wasn't selling. The team went straight into research mode, which led to an amazing finding. After visiting one consumer's home who had nine cats and an inability to smell them, that's when they realized, why would consumers want to get rid of a smell they don't even know exists? This insight was one of the many the marketing team gained through consumer interviews and focus groups. They updated their formula to include a perfume to the previously odorless spray. And they updated their messaging to position Febreze as a reward at the end of your cleaning ritual rather than a new step in people's cleaning process. And it paid off. Their sales doubled, and a year later, Febreze brought in $230 million in sales. So if there's one thing you take away from this video, let it be this. First comes the data, then the insights, then the strategy and you can get started today. Identify the main channels you use to collect the data from your audience and keep them open. Set check ins with your team to review trends and revise your marketing tactics accordingly. At Jamal's Cookies, we live to feed people another day. Without consumer behavior analysis, we wouldn't have been able to find the answers we needed to give our customers a better experience and increase our revenue. So whether you're in the same boat as Jamal's Cookies or your company is doing great, but you see room for improvement, Leverage consumer behavior analysis to jumpstart your research. Be sure to check out our 2023 consumer trends report, which you can download in the description below. And don't forget to like, share and subscribe for more insightful videos on all of the things you need to do for your marketing gain. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to celebrate. And until then, I'll see you next time I can find this client info.

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