Can you influence consumer behaviour through an effective content strategy?
In short… oh hells yes you can! It all takes a good understanding of human psychology, a dollop of analysis and tracking behaviour online, regular interaction with your audience, and of course - a cracking content strategy.
Before we begin…what do we mean by ‘consumer behaviour’?
OK, this all might sound a little intimidating - but honestly, it’s not. Let’s take it one step at a time and first ask ourselves what we actually mean by consumer behaviour…
In summary, behaviour is the way a person responds to a particular situation or stimulus. Understanding behaviour is about understanding the psychology and emotions behind decision making, why some people react one way and others another.
Now, as a business, you want to trigger a specific action by your potential customers. Sign up to our courses, download our music, buy our product, come to our restaurant…
In order to trigger these actions, you need to influence that behaviour through your content. Ensure you have the appropriate tone of voice, gain trust through a stellar brand story and shared values and principles with your audience.
Your content and messaging needs to be timed appropriately with your audiences so that you are present and engaging when they are and not pushing the hard sell too soon. It’s about understanding them, nurturing them, and reflecting your shared values through your messaging.
Step 1: analyse and reflect
Before we do any strategy, creation or marketing, we want to truly get to know and understand our audience and their existing behaviour.
Using online tools such as Google Analytics, Google Trends, reading trend reports and insights tools, market research surveys and social media analysis, we can dig into:
What content our audiences are currently interacting with
What are they searching for online, and how is this changing over time?
What are their demographics (age, gender, location, interests) - (NB - if you are using Google Analytics to look at your website visitors demographics, you will need to switch on your Google Signals)
What competitors are they currently engaging with?
What platforms are they using, and at what times?
What PR, news and media do they engage with?
What is the average time you need to market to consumers before they convert?
What is the average Cost Per Acquisition for your industry?
Step 2: create awareness
Ensure that your brand language is reflective of what your customers are wanting from your business. By this, I don’t mean mirroring your audience's voice, as this may not be appropriate - your consumers might want you to be reassuring, authoritative, helpful, hilarious, straight-talking, or therapeutic. Run some messaging tests to see which land better and evolve it over time.
Have a clear brand story and ethos communicating your values and promise, and ensure that this is communicated through your marketing channels. For example: are you environmentally conscious? Or, do you ensure everything you create is done in an ethical way? Values like this are important to your audience (you know this from your research), so shout about it and become part of the conversation with your audience.
Step 3: inform or help your audience
Now you’ve spoken their language and gained some awareness, start to be directly helpful and give them what they are looking for. You’ve said what your promise is, now what is your proposition? What problems do your audience have that you can solve?
Have clear key messages for this stage in the user journey and communicate using the same language as before, but softly starting to offer value, selling the benefits that you offer.
Step 4: give them a little nudge
OK, at this point your audience knows who you are, and what you can help them with. Now, you can start to influence their behaviour by suggesting a warm call to action.
Sign up to hear more about our work; buy this product; attend our event – whatever the key action is that you want your audience to do, choose one and stick to it.
Keep it simple, keep it clear.
Step 5: don’t be a stranger - nurture them
Once you start seeing engagement and conversions from your audience, don’t drop them to chase after shiny new customers. Instead, focus on driving loyalty by providing a valuable relationship to your existing customers, encouraging repeat purchasing and word of mouth referrals.
Email marketing, social media or a useful resource hub on your website are brilliant ways of rewarding someone for using your business, and making sure that you stick as a positive experience in their minds.
Throughout all steps - keep evaluating
Ensure that throughout you are always measuring, testing and asking yourself if you are marketing and producing content in the most effective way. We are all time-poor and behaviour changes FAST, so ensure that you keep ahead of any changes and don’t waste time producing pointless content by continuously monitoring the effectiveness of everything that you do.
Keep talking to your customers too, ask them to do surveys through emails, conduct polls through Instagram, host social media live Q&A events - anything that is interactive and helps you get a better understanding of your customers needs, wants and problems.
The key take home
Influencing behaviour through content isn’t a ‘quick win’ – it takes time to thoroughly understand, create relevant content and see the results - especially if it’s all organic.
But keep persevering and if you ever want to talk to a specialist, I’m right here to help!
