You use your marketing efforts to persuade your customers / consumers to buy your product and services. At the same time, your competitors and the marketplace provide distractions and disruptions that can either weaken the effectiveness of your efforts or disrupt it completely.
Do you know what percentage of shopping trips your consumer goes into a store planning to buy your product only to walk out with your competitor’s product? Do you know why you lose these sales?
An earlier blog post talks to the reasons consumers buy products and services. This post will talk to the people and marketing that influence purchases and the potential points of influence where you can win and lose a purchase. While this subject is complex enough to merit a book chapter or an entire book (perhaps a future endeavor?), this three-part blog will provide a high level summary that I hope is helpful for you.
We will look at 4 key points of influence during the shopping process: Marketplace, Pre-Store Research, Shopping Destination Selection and the In-Store Shopping Process. These points can be linear steps in the shopping process or overlap depending on the shopper and product category.
Marketplace
The marketplace is where most traditional marketing lives—especially outbound broadcast and print media. You send your advertising out into the market hoping it will disrupt, engage and persuade your target consumer to buy your product. But if your target consumer is not in the market or is not disrupted by your communication, all of your efforts can be just background noise. For these non-shopping target consumers, all forms and locations of your marketing are just background information. You brand communication will likely have a cumulative impact on your brand image and awareness for a future time when a consumer does enter the market to buy your product or service. But, until those consumers do enter the market, your marketing has its greatest influence on those planning near term purchases.
For consumers in shopping mode for a particular product or service category, messages received from category suppliers will resonate, be evaluated and incorporated into the purchase decision process. Advertising works, but it is much more effective with consumers who are also actively shoppers. If your product has infrequent purchases and is a lower priced item, you should consider focusing your marketing dollars at other points of influence.
Pre-Store Research
The next point of influence in the shopping journey is the pre-store research effort where shoppers gather information on what products and services they are considering/planning to buy. This information gathering increasingly uses search engines, forums, blogs, company websites, retailer websites and consumer reviews as some of the key information sources. Consumers are seeking this information on their computers and via smartphones. In Google’s white-paper ZMOT, Winning the Zero Moment of Truth, author Jim Lecinski shared that half of all shoppers are using search engines to conduct product research, 38% comparison shop products online and 36% sought information from a manufacturer’s website. To access this kind of data, 79% of consumers now say they use a smartphone to help with shopping.
The implication of this behavior is that you should make it easy for consumers to find your brand and product information online. To help your brand win your category, be the best at having your product information available where consumers are looking. Do you have a clear strategy for Google, SEO, YouTube, Facebook, your website and other online destinations? Consider an integrated approach to these digital marketing tools to achieve consistent branding and information across all consumer touch points.
Increasingly, consumers are placing more weight on the product feedback of other consumers, so having a solid source of product reviews for your brand on your site and your retailers’ sites can help you win the purchase decision.
Consumers also continue to be highly influenced by friends and family members. Many brands are handed down from parent to child as the right brand to use. Friends and family are often viewed as the key trusted experts over other information sources. Google says 49% of consumers talk with friends or family while researching products. Word-of-mouth marketing has high impact in categories that rely on personal recommendations.
In certain categories, celebrity or pro recommendations have high credibility and trust as a source of influence. This is not true for all products, so research the impact of these endorsers in your category before investing money here.
While pre-store research does not play a role in all categories, it is increasing in importance and impact for many consumer products. Make sure your brand offers your shoppers the information they want in the places where they will look for it. Finding information on your products needs to be easy. If shoppers have to work hard to research your brand, they are more likely to buy from your competitor.
The above covers the Marketplace and Pre-Store Research points of influence for shopping. We discuss the key decision and influence factors when selecting a shopping destination in Part 2 of this blog.
GrowthSpring Group is a market research, marketing strategy and innovation firm focused on accelerating your sales and profit growth. We help you identify new business growth insights & opportunities and execute winning strategies & plans. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com
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