The ongoing pandemic (COVID-19) has altered the consumer behaviour, not just in terms of purchasing patterns, but, also in terms of consumer interaction with internet, which needless to mention, has increased drastically. COVID-19 has brought a paradigm shift in consumer purchasing patterns, more so, the mode of purchasing. The internet has been an important source of knowledge, shopping, entertainment and corporate communication for more than a decade, but, its true importance has been realised by business and consumers alike, during this tough pandemic.

In this article, we won’t be elaborating on the importance of digital marketing, as it has been previously done. (Check here) Furthermore, our website contains plethora of useful stats and information, including FAQ’s about digital marketing as a domain. Instead, we will be focussing on consumer behaviour and consumer journey in an internet driven economy. Also, we would be learning on how to do marketing in sync with the changing times.

Understanding the Consumer Behaviour & Consumer Journey

Think about the last important purchase you made. Perhaps you bought a car, a home theatre, hired a digital creative agency, or thought of investing in a good air purifier. Chances are, you explored the internet for reviews, got some recommendation from family and relatives, or from friends on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, etc., and boned up on the features, options, and price of the product or service before you made the final decision of your choice.

Today, especially after the pandemic, purchase decisions and majority of the purchases are increasingly made over the internet. Therefore, regardless of what you sell, an online presence to tap the ever-changing consumer behaviour is a must to capitalise this post COVID-19 trend.

This new digital landscape is impacting organisations in more than just the marketing and sales departments. Savvy companies use the Internet to drive awareness, promote brand visibility and invoke interest in their products and services. Not only this, internet as a resource, helps them to convert causal buyers into brand advocates who buy more and encourage members within their network to do the same, vis word-of-mouth and members outside their network, via reviews on Google, Yahoo, and social media platforms.

Well the truth is, nothing in marketing has changed. Marketing is still about developing a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects, leads and customers. We call the development of this relationship the customer journey. We will be further learning what changes in consumer behaviour have led to what type of changes in the consumer journey, how to understand and tap it. Just remember, that digital marketing plays a pivotal role in assisting moving a prospect, lead, or customer, from one stage of the journey to the next.

As the role of your organisation’s marketing is to move people through a series of stages from cold prospects to rapid fans and promotion of your product or services, you must first attain clarity on the characteristics of your ideal customers. You want to get clear on their goals, the challenges they face in meeting those goals, what is the consumer behaviour and where they spend their time consuming information and entertainment.

Creating a customer avatar will provide you utmost clarity on this. You can also call customer avatar as buyer persons, marketing persona, target audience, target group, but customer avatar is what we propose to get better understanding of your consumer behaviour.

What is customer avatar?

Consider customer avatar as a fictional, rather generalised representation of your ideal customer. Consider it as the set of those factors that drives a certain consumer behaviour. Realistically, unless your product or service fits within a narrow niche, you will have to create multiple customer avatars for multiple campaigns. People are not just their age, gender, ethnicity, religious background, profession, and likewise. People don’t fit neatly into boxes, which is why broad, generic marketing don’t actually convert well, more so after COVID-19. The complete idea is to make your content, product or service, resonate with your targeted audience.

Hence, it is very essential that you make your customer avatar as specific as possible so that you can craft bespoke content, offers, and other marketing campaigns that creates interest among your audience and solves their problems. Also, it should instil positive consumer behaviour.

Creating a customer avatar is so important that it impacts virtually every aspect of your organisational’s marketing activities, including –

Content Marketing

What blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on should you create to attract and convert your avatar?

Search Engine Marketing

What solutions is your avatar searching for on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing?

Social Media Marketing

What social media sites is your avatar spending time on? What interests your avatar the most?

Email Marketing

Which avatar should receive a specific email campaign?

Paid Traffic

Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and how do you plan to target your avatar, as in, using which keywords?

Product creation

What problems is your avatar trying to solve?

Copywriting

How should you describe your offers in your email marketing, ads, and sales letters in a away that compels your avatar to buy?

Any part of the sales and marketing process that touches the customer, and drives positive consumer behaviour, improves when you get clarity on your customer avatar. After all marketing is all about understanding the needs of the customers and creating a product or a service that will solve that need.

What to include in your customer avatar?

1. Goals & Values

The process of customer avatar creation begins with identifying the goals and values of one of your ideal customer, let’s say ‘X’. X owns a digital creative agency and manages a team of marketers providing serving to the clients. The goals and values of X are shown below –

X knows that a more capable team would provide better services to the client, thereby, customer satisfaction.

Because X’s agency has this goal , he is more likely to respond to Email Marketing, with a subject line, such as –

“7 tips on how to build a robust team”

and likewise…

2. Finding sources of information and entertainment

Consumer behaviour is a lot dependent on where your customer avatar is spending his time online.

The idea is to find the time spent on the internet and further break it down to finding niche websites, blogs, e-magazines, celebrities and other interests that your ideal customer would be attracted to. For example – if you sell golf products, you wouldn’t assign Tiger Woods as a celebrity. Tiger Woods is a celebrity your customer avatar would follow, but a large percentage of people interested in Tiger Woods are not golfers and aren’t likely to buy your golf products.

Instead, you can choose a more niche golfer like Rory McIlroy. This will allow you to hone in your ideal customer and exclude people who wouldn’t find value in your product. If you find these niches buying traffic from ad platforms like Facebook, you can often laser-target your audience by focusing on prospects who have these niche interests, while excluding less-than-ideal prospects.

3. Demographics

Demographic information for your customer avatar is also useful for targeting options in ad platforms like Facebook. Try connecting with your avatar, as emotionally as possible, even by visualising the person if you can. This is important because when you are writing content, email, or a sales copy, you can write what resonates with your avatar the most, just like he is sitting across the table. Also, location gives your persona a look and feel.

4. Adding challenges & pain-points

Consumer behaviour is largely impacted by the challenges that one faces.

When selling products and services to X, our company would do well to build solutions to his challenges and pain-points and use language that addresses those in the marketing messages. For example – the avatar X would respond to sales copy like the following –

Are you tired of losing proposals because you don’t offer content marketing services to the client? Certify your team with content marketing courses and certifications.

5. Objections

The last step is to decide that what could be the factors on which your customer avatar might decline your products or services. It may be anything related to the timelines, price, location, etc. The idea is to promote positive consumer behaviour and make changes in your marketing that resonates the best with the type of consumer behaviour your avatar depicts.

The above-mentioned 5 points will help you decode consume behaviour and analyse your customer avatar on the internet, especially during these COVID-19 times. In this article, we have purely shared the factors which effect consumer behaviour and how you can create a customer avatar to decode those factors.

In the next article, we will be learning about the customer journey.

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