In marketing, we all want to increase sales and improve upon current ROI thresholds. This is the primary purpose of marketing, and it’s likely why you are reading this right now! A quick review of Chat GPT tells us that the purpose of marketing is to profitably identify, service, and retain customers. (We probably did not need artificial intelligence to tell us this, but hey, it’s 2024, and we must reference it!) This is what drives every marketer, regardless of product and audience. There are numerous areas of marketing that impact ROI and performance, such as improving your website, optimizing your media mix, testing creative, and many more. Each of these are important and valuable tactics and we applaud those that make the effort to improve them. But, making positive changes in each of these areas requires something else first:
Knowing your audience and how they make choices.
As marketers, we don’t make these changes in a vacuum. Rather, we make specific changes based on what we know (or believe) about our target audience’s behaviors, attitudes, and feelings about our brand, and this heightened knowledge is critically imperative for marketing success. All marketing efforts are designed to positively influence consumers’ perceptions, feelings, and behaviors towards a particular brand, product, or activity. Influencing behavior is how marketing delivers upon the primary goal of increasing sales. But how do we really influence consumer behavior? It starts with understanding the psyche of the consumer. Consumers’ attitudes, desires, fears, and beliefs all influence future behavior.
According to Psychology Today, all decisions involve both emotional and rational factors, however the degree to which emotions play a role depending on the complexities of the decision to be made. For example, the choice to purchase a new home likely has an increased presence of rational factors, while a decision to go on a family vacation may have more emotion at play, and the decision of where to attend college may have an equal valuation to both factors. It is the marketer’s job to understand these factors, which is more vital, and when.
Knowing your audience is important, but how can understanding how your audience makes decisions improve your ROI? Here’s two ways this knowledge helps:
- By understanding the level of emotional and rational factors involved in a decision, marketers can create a messaging strategy aligned with these factors and improve initial response rates. Slight changes in language can have big impacts on performance. Because your message resonates more strongly with the audience’s needs, you drive a higher response rate.
- Both emotional and rational factors have a strong impact on pricing strategy. Your audience’s FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) may create a heightened sense of urgency and allow for higher pricing. In some instances, a decision with a heavier focus on rational factors may require increasing product value, thus potentially lowering prices.
These are just a couple of ways that deepening your knowledge about your customers, and how they make choices, will positively impact your marketing performance. Understanding the complexities of decision making is what separates good advertising from great advertising, and it’s what sets Crawford apart from our peers. We are dedicated to understanding the consumer decision-making process so we can effectively position our clients’ brands to deliver on both the rational and emotional needs of their customers and deliver exceptional ROI and sales lift.