The digital age has brought about a fundamental change in the way people do business and how they shop. Just a few decades ago, if someone wanted to buy something, they would have needed to go to a physical store as there was no other alternative. This often caused shoppers to spend their money more cautiously.
However, in today’s world, shopping (and spending money) has never been easier. You can buy pretty much anything you want from the comfort of your own couch without ever even having to leave the house. This has brought on an entirely new wave of buying behaviors that businesses should be aware of, including impulse buying marketing.
In this article, we will briefly examine how businesses today can utilize modern buying behaviors and why understanding buying behavior is so important. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about buying behavior.
What’s So Important About Buying Behavior?
By analyzing the buying behaviors of your target audience, you can gain insight into how they want to spend their money, what kinds of products they’re looking for, and what kinds of marketing they respond best to. Such insights will help you create marketing strategies that will accelerate your customers’ buying decisions.
Some things you can achieve by understanding your customers’ buying behavior include:
- Adjusting advertisements to best suit the buying behaviors of your customers.
- Construct messages that target specific types of buyers.
- Time your advertisements to reach the buyer when they typically like to purchase your products. This could include holidays, weekends, or when products come back in stock.
- Reassure buyers to spend their money with your company instead of your competitors
These are just a few of the ways your business can benefit from understanding your customers’ buying behaviors. There are plenty of other ways this understanding can pay off over time.
How To Influence Buying Behavior
Buying behavior is influenced by many different factors, such as price, quality, and convenience. Other less rational concerns also contribute, like feelings and desires. All buying decisions are motivated by a combination of these factors. This means you need to understand them to influence their behavior.
To better influence buying behavior, you should understand each of the things that drive buying decisions. They include mental factors like rational considerations or pricing, emotional factors like personal beliefs or emotions, and behavioral factors like brand loyalty or habit.
How each of these factors influences, the buying practices will be based entirely upon who they are. What does their life look like? Think of their lifestyle, consumption habits, personal values, brand loyalties, demographics, relationships, and personality.
By getting inside your customers’ heads, you’ll be able to see how they like to spend their money and will be able to market toward that behavior. To effectively reach your customers, you need to craft advertisements and marketing messages that resonate with them.
Other factors to consider that influence buying behavior are more dynamic, such as peer groups, societal norms, or cultural fads. As dynamic factors like these change, so does buy behavior. Making use of agile market research can help your business stay on top of constantly changing consumer behaviors.
Kinds of Buying Behavior
The four main types of behavior include dissonance-reducing behavior, complex behavior, variety-seeking behavior, and habitual behavior. Many purchases will fall into one of these four categories, so understanding each of them is important.
Dissonance Reducing Behavior
Buyers express dissonance-reducing behavior when they are afraid of making the wrong purchase. It is often linked to the fear of feeling buyer’s remorse as every customer wants to feel satisfied with their purchases.
Complex Behavior
Complex buying behavior comes into play when consumers make a large purchase, such as a house or a new car. This behavior is called “complex” because the buyer is so invested in the purchase that they conduct in-depth research to figure out if they’re making the right decisions with their money. Buyers are more likely to engage in this behavior when making a purchase that will affect their lives in a big way.
Variety Seeking Behavior
This behavior is characterized by the tendency to seek variety in purchases made. Buyers may engage in this type of buy behavior if they’re searching for the right product for them but have yet to find it or if they’re tired of the same old product they always buy.
Habitual Behavior
Opposite of variety-seeking behavior, habitual behavior is the tendency to buy the same product repeatedly because it has become a habit. This is behavior influenced by brand loyalty and does not require much time or research to be done.
Understanding each of the four types of buying behaviors is key. If you can channel a certain buy behavior behind your company’s products and services, you’ll be able to attract the right buyers with the right behaviors.
Final Thoughts
Buying behavior is not necessarily a new concept. Even in the past, when every purchase was made at a physical store location, businesses still had to understand their customers’ behaviors to present their products in the right way.
This is potentially even more important today with the advent of the digital age. Buyers are spending less time in general when shopping. They want the ease of access and readily accessible information and reviews on your products. However, all buyers are different, so it is important to understand what makes your customers spend money.
By following the tips we’ve outlined above, you should be able to get a head start on influencing your customers’ buying behaviors. This all starts with an understanding of who they are and how they like to spend their money. Start researching your customers’ buying behaviors today.
Featured Image by justynafaliszek from Pixabay
