Archives for March 2020

Target audience analysis is a vital part of many marketing strategies. Without understanding who you should be marketing to, and what it is they want to know about a brand or product, marketers wouldn’t have a clue what to talk about!

A brand’s target audience is made up of anyone who might potentially be interested in a product or service being offered. As an article by Point Visible best puts it, marketing budgets are unfortunately limited so companies might not have the possibility to cater to everyone that might be a potential customer. A target audience might also consist of different groups of people that don’t necessarily visit the same websites, have the same problems, or use the same social network channels. This is why it’s not just important to have creative content, but the right type of content to drive in those who are truly interested. When a company understands who their true audience is and the problems they are facing and how these problems can be solved with a purchase, marketers can personalize their content marketing strategies to meet these needs.

An article on Aspiring Gentleman describes a few brands who used audience analysis to reinvent their brand image and marketing strategy in order to reach the right people. One example is Taco Bell and how they borrowed ideas from hip and trendy Mexican joints by calling their new Vegas restaurants “Cantinas.” They also began selling alcohol and funny taco souvenirs. Nike also analyzed recent social movements and affiliated with activist athlete Colin Kapernick to make a powerful statement when they released the sport-hijab for Muslim women. They analyzed and understood the emotions of many young consumers who are concerned with social issues.

What made these campaigns successful was that both companies analyzed their audiences. It was important for them to understand what their audiences wanted. They also needed to understand who the primary age group of the audience is, their gender, their hobbies, marital status, and more. By building and maintain a connection with the audience, companies pave the way for their revenue to pour in. When a company doesn’t take the time to understand who their customers truly are, they have a hard time communicating and relating to the people who would otherwise likely purchase their products. As a result, companies who do use audience analysis as a tool tend to outshine those that don’t.

For companies to be successful, they must persistently use audience analysis and connect with their audience. This will not only place them in an optimal position but make for some satisfied customers as well.

For marketing strategies to be successful, they must find a way to tap into the consumer’s senses and emotions. In order to build a brand, marketers must work to reinforce the image that the brand triggers in the minds and hearts of current and potential customers. A brand’s reputation is incredibly important, but the one thing that is truly important which can make or break the brand, is consumer perception.

Marketing is successful when the process of advertising and selling a product creates an impression in the consumer’s mind that drives loyalty. An article of Bizfluent mentions the outdoor apparel company L.L. Bean and their return policy of replacing any product that a customer returns for any reason, regardless of how long it has been worn. Although this policy may cost the company a lot of money in the short term as dishonest customers take advantage of it and return items that have been worn for long periods of time, in the long term the return policy works for the company. The return policy builds up the company’s brand by building trust and loyalty because consumers’ perception of the brand is a positive one.

However, sometimes negative consumer perceptions can have just as much, if not more of an impact as positive ones. With the age of social media, everything is put under a microscope and what is otherwise a small situation or misunderstanding can spiral into a huge scandal that can often tarnish a brand. For example, Southwest Airlines has been under a lot of scrutiny in the past few years. From kicking customers off their flights over the years for unfair reasons (like speaking Arabic and having pet allergies), to physically dragging customers off planes and dealing with a customer fatality due to an exploding engine, the Southwest brand has suffered due to poor consumer perception of the airline. As a matter of fact, Southwest Airlines lost millions of dollars in revenue due to their issues over the years. Consumers shared these stories on social media and the airline received backlash from customers who decided to boycott the company. The negative publicity caused the company’s price to plummet.

The way a consumer perceives a brand can impact their consumer decision making process. Customer perception plays an important role in a company’s ability to attract new customers and to keep the customers they already have. By coming up with and properly executing marketing strategies as well as working on some of the factors that build on a person’s perception of a company or brand, marketers can boost a brand’s perception and drive sales as a result.

Marketers are not exactly psychologists, but they do need to have an understanding of psychology in order to successfully put together marketing strategies. When marketers implement basic psychological marketing principles in their social media activities, they begin to attract, engage, and form emotional bonds with their target audience. It’s a way of connecting with current and potential customers on a deeper level.

Below are just a few of the best ways to use psychology in social media marketing.

 

The Use of Emotions

Emotions can get the best of us. Think about videos that have gone viral because they pull on heart strings. Videos of feel good moments go viral all the time. The reason this happens is because when people experience extreme emotions, they are more likely to want to share that experience. The use of emotion in a post is likely to make an impact. Marketers can use this to their advantage by ensuring that the content posted has emotional narratives. This neuromarketing tactic uses emotional reactions that are triggered when people feel connected to something. If an audience feels close and connected and like they can relate to a company, there’s a chance they might begin to engage. In order to form emotional connections, companies must interact with followers in meaningful ways. They can do this by using emotions such as laughter in order to make an impact.

 

Gift-Giving

People love reciprocity. In fact, it’s an important psychological sales tactic. The idea behind this is that if you give someone something, they usually find the need to reciprocate. Marketers know this, so they tend to promote products and take advantage of this by launching contests and giving away gifts. This means that if a company asks followers to share a post for a chance to win a gift, they likely will. If you offer an audience a free coupon or a free gift in exchange for their email address, chances are they’ll give it to you. An article by Social Media Examiner gives a great example of this tactic. They mention that on Real Madrid’s Facebook page, the team recently offered free shorts with the purchase of a kid’s shirt from the team’s official store. In just an hour, the post received over 16,000 reactions and 63 shares. In other words, gift giving is a great way for a business to drive engagement. The idea is to offer something to the target audience while ensuring that they also offer something to the company in return.

 

Choose Trustworthy Partners

When it comes to influencing engagements and conversions, trust is important. By associating with trusted brands that the audience you are targeting already trusts, companies begin to build relationships and with influencers who add credibility to your brand. Let’s take Fashion Nova as an example. Fashion Nova is an economical women’s clothing brand who partnered with Kylie Jenner. As an influencer, Kylie Jenner promotes Fashion Nova products by engaging a niche audience via social media—primarily Instagram. Kylie posts photos of herself in Fashion Nova attire and each of her posts received thousands of likes and comments. As a result, this also drives social media engagement to the company’s Instagram account. This is an effective neuromarketing tactic because people tend to respond positively to people that they like.

They psychological marketing tactics mentioned only begin to scratch the surface. There are many neuromarketing methods that can be used to increase social media engagement and improve so many points of business performance as well. Pairing psychology with marketing efforts encourages brand loyalty among current and prospective customers and fuel business growth. Psychology had been around for centuries, so it’s no surprise that marketers are catching on to all the ways that it can be applied to social media in order to improve businesses. It’s not just a science, it’s also an art.

Although market segmentation and cluster analysis are sometimes used interchangeably, there are differences between the processes of segmenting markets and clustering data.

Cluster analysis is basically a stats tool that allows marketers to group data based on the similarities and statistical connections that they share. This means that data can be categorized and organized depending on the similarities and differences that they share. A cluster refers to a group of data that’s similar. Each Individual groups of clusters is homogenous and share similar data but when compared to one another, groups are heterogeneous because each cluster is different from the other clusters. Companies interpret data based on market segmentation, which is a way of grouping customers depending on certain products or purchasing behaviors. Some factors that companies use to create groups are location, demographics, geographic or socio-economic attributes, and factors pertaining to particular products.

An article by Agilone, puts it simply: Segmenting is the process of putting customers into groups based on similarities, and clustering is the process of finding similarities in customers so that they can be grouped, and therefore segmented. They seem quite similar, but they are not quote the same.

When a company needs to understand which target audience to focus on, they turn to cluster analysis in order to segment their customers depending on the similarities and differences they share. Cluster analysis is not only helpful in routing the development of functioning market segments, but it also provides useful statistical measures of likely target markets. Marketers want to be able to effectively segment markets. By just grouping data together, marketers may not reach their desired outcome. In order to best understand cluster analysis, think of it as a tool that allows for developing market segments much in the same way you would use excel to calculate and analyze data. Once a company decides how to segment and group consumers, they can begin to come up with marketing strategies depending on the needs of each target group.

A marketer should first understand what outputs are best to use and understand what an effective market segment looks like and whether or not the brand can use it as a probably target market. Cluster analysis becomes a bridge that allows marketers to better understand consumer data and therefore create strong market segments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Growth hacking. It’s one of the latest buzzwords, but what does it actually mean? An article by marketing expert Andrew Chen mentions that growth hackers are the new VP’s of marketing. Still, this gives little insight into what exactly it is and what makes it different from marketing as we know it.

Growth hacking is a relatively new marketing field that really focuses on growth. This technique started with new startups who were eager to grow massively and quickly with limited budgets. However, it has spread to much larger and corporate level companies. The overall purpose of growth hacking is to bring in as many new customers as possible and grow businesses while not spending very much. However, it’s much more than that. It’s also a mindset and a skillset.

Let’s take Airbnb as an example. The popular Airbnb started as a bed and breakfast using an air mattress. However, according to an article by Growth Tribe, the creators of this service found a way to reverse engineer Craigslist in 2010 and hacked the platform to make use of their customers. By building a bot that redirected people viewing apartment listings on Craigslist to Airbnb, they began to see a lot of growth. This is growth hacking. Growth hackers are not too worried about the steps that should be taken or the tool that should be used to meet marketing goals, but more interested in using their analytical thinking to find opportunities for growth. This is why startups and companies who need exposure to grow their revenues are interested in the practice. It allows them to attract new customers quickly and for a low cost. Different marketing methods such as social media, targeted advertising, reverse engineering SEO, email marketing, content marketing, analytics, A/B testing, and more can also be used by growth hackers to meet these goals.

To make it a bit clearer, growth hackers are always experimenting and pushing limits in order to find unconventional acquisition strategies. This is why they’re known as “hackers.” Is it ethical? Not really. However, growth hacking methods tend to be effective. Growth hacking also shares the same basic principles as digital marketing. Both disciplines are focused on metrics, increased engagement, increased conversion, and increased retention. Growth marketing isn’t really defining the goal of marketing, but it is definitely changing the way marketers drive awareness and ultimately, drive sales.

Growth hacking is on the rise. The term has been around for a few years but is really now catching fire. For now, it is mostly regulated to startups but in the future, we may even see Fortune 500 companies utilizing growth hacking. However, one thing is for sure. Those who understand growth hacking have competitive advantages.

Some of the best insight that marketers can receive is understanding why consumers make purchases and what they are purchasing. With this information in hand, marketers can understand how to market products in such a way that sales will be successful.

Picture this: You’re standing in the shampoo aisle trying to select a new product. You want a shampoo that is paraben free, won’t dry your hair out, and restores your volume. You stand there, looking at each of the products and trying to decide on one that might work for you. Eventually, you select a product and place it in your shopping cart. Why did you choose that particular shampoo? Believe it or not, there are underlying factors as to why you went with this product. This is consumer behavior in action.

Consumer behavior is a pattern of behaviors that consumers tend to follow when they are about to make a purchase. Consumers usually become aware of the need or desire they have for a product and then purchase the product. When marketers understand why consumers select certain products, they stand a better chance of marketing the product to consumers in a way that makes the product desirable. Once companies can tap into the mind of consumers and understand why they are making certain purchases, they can figure out how to best meet the needs of their customers.

Consumer behavior tends to be motivated by several factors including psychology, personality, external motivators, and of course the type of buyer. According to an article by Marketing 91, people tend to buy products based on impulse, needs, wants or demands, lifestyle and necessity. There are many reasons that understanding consumer buying behavior is beneficial. It helps marketers understand any probably future problems and how they can be improved. Consumer behavior can help companies understand how to develop products that are useful to consumers. Additionally, consumer buying behavior is beneficial in increasing revenue and brand equity, finding gaps in product portfolios, understanding market trends, sales or demand forecasting, analyzing competitive analyses, and of course effectively segmenting and targeting consumers.

There are so many benefits to studying consumer buying behavior, that it is important for companies to engage in this practice if they intend to have a sustainable advantage. Consumer-centric marketing is real. With the way our world constantly changes and evolves, customer interests are always shifting. Businesses needs to be alert and receptive to these changes in order to improve their insights into consumer behavior.

Small details can define whether a website is successful or a total failure. This is why statistics and website metrics are so important. By at least tracking some website metrics and using data in order to understand what is positively pushing the website over what isn’t contributing at all, marketers can understand what areas to improve upon. If you think about it, most successful websites invest in tracking key metrics. There are some performance metrics that are very important for tracking, including website traffic, traffic sources, bounce rate and conversion rates. Each tracks something different, but each plays an equally important role to the success of a website.

 

Website Traffic

It’s important to track the total number of visits to a website, and luckily this is very easy to track using Google Analytics. This tool is useful for tracking whether a website is growing or declining, and for tracking whether promotions are working to draw in customers. For example, if I were to post a blog featuring an article by a well-known expert, and my website suddenly begins to see a lot of traffic, measuring these numbers would show me that it would be a good idea to do this more often in order to increase traffic. Google Analytics also further breaks down this traffic by indicating how many of these visitors are new and how many are repeats.

 

Traffic Sources

Tracking website metrics can also reveal where exactly traffic is coming from. For example, these metrics might highlight how much incoming traffic is organic and coming from search engines, direct and being typed into browsers, social and being directed to from social media, and based on referrals or traffic from other websites. Each of these sources can provide indications as to how to best use social media and SEO practices in order to engage customers.

 

Bounce Rate

This metric is crucial in understanding how many visitors leave your website right after landing. The lower your website’s bounce rate is, the more visitors that are actually staying on your website and likely converting. By picking apart this information, it’s easier to see what changes must be made to a website in order to improve the bounce rate. Although these metrics will not exactly zero in on the reason that visitors are leaving a website, common problems include slow loading times, broken websites, and downright ugly websites. This gives businesses/individuals an opportunity to investigate these problems and fix the source of the problem to improve this metric.

 

Conversion Rates

Likely the most important metric of them al, and the one that has the ability to really impact a company’s profit it conversion rate. The ultimate goal is for a website to increase their conversion rate. Measuring the conversion rate can show us how well we are convincing visitors to perform the actions we want them to perform. Not only can we use Google Analytics to track this metric, but it’s also easy to calculate by using the following formula: Unique Visitors/Conversions. Conversion rates are what impact profits, so being able to measure this metric is valuable because it can allow website adjustments in order to optimize the website so that it is hitting those conversion goals.

Tracking metrics provides the proof and number needed to actually track the health of a website. With basic formulas and sophisticated tools such as Google Analytics, tracking at least basic conversions has become simple. Using the information gathered in order to improve a website’s functionality and results will put the website in a great position to continue to grow and get sought-after results.

Global branding is when products or services are marketed under the same name in various different countries. These products have similar marketing strategies with their advertising, positioning, personality, and look and feel remaining mostly unchanged from one country to another.

According to an article by Small Business, “global branding means using standardized global advertising and global marketing strategies. It’s basically a method of designing standardized global advertising and global marketing strategies in order to develop a product or service that is recognized worldwide, regardless of the country, continent or region where it is marketed.” Global brands are recognized everywhere. By using similar marketing strategies to promote the brand all over, companies make sure that the brand is being presented reliably in every market.

One of the great things about global branding Is how companies benefit through the economies of scale. This means that although languages and customs may differ, brands can use the same advertising strategy, brand images and brand representations anywhere. For example, McDonald’s, Google, Disney, and Apple are some brands who remain unchanged regardless of what country they are being marketed in. Each of these companies have had tremendous success in using the same marketing strategies and images to advertise their product regardless of where they are in the world. This has become easier to do in our modern age due to the internet.

Global branding has various benefits for consumers. The first advantage is that because the brand is globally known, products are very easily identified so consumers tend to be quicker to purchase. Consumers also tend to believe that globally marketed brands are of better quality since they are sold everywhere. This means that the brand has a strong presence regardless of country, language, tradition, and beliefs. The product breaks all barriers, which is difficult to do. Another benefit is that prices tend to be consistent. This means that an Apple iPhone will charge you roughly the same amount in the United States as it will in Italy.

Due to their quality and consistency, globally marketed brands draw in consumer loyalty because they are often seen as dependable and consistent. This means that these companies can charge a premium for their products since consumers are willing to pay more for something that they believe they are getting their money’s worth for. It makes sense for companies that are doing well and leaving a large footprint to expand globally and then adapt their brand to the country’s culture for optimal success. This allows the product to really understand the customer and merge with their values and traditions while still maintaining the same quality and consistency being offered everywhere else.

An article by the Harvard Business Review makes a valid point. “All multinational companies should actively engage in global brand management. Any company that tries to get by with unconnected and directionless local brand strategies will inevitably find mediocrity as its reward.”