How Your Digital Marketing Influences Your Customers’ Purchasing Decisions
The best way to represent your brand in a way that can be easily recognized and relatable is through digital marketing for businesses. By engaging customers and curious investors through personal social media platforms, you can better showcase your business along with the products or services it offers. However, when deciding on your digital marketing strategies, it’s best to start with the ways you want to influence your shoppers’ decisions throughout the buying process.
Could Social Media Be the Biggest Decider in Buying Decisions?
Social media can be an overwhelming topic, but when simplified, it can be quite an easy and profitable approach to your customers. As a matter of fact, nearly 71 percent of consumers are more likely to purchase a product or service when viewing social media referrals. Due to this fact, social media is one of the biggest peer influences to help your customers shop smart with your business.
What Makes Consumers Love Social Media?
Who doesn’t love blogging about what they do every day? The most popular social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram prove to be an effective way for consumers to respond to each other in sharing information and experiences, not to mention when it comes to making tricky buying decisions. However, among the various other ways for consumers to use social media, here are some of the most trending:
- Ability to apply for sweepstakes and promotions
- Give feedback
- Help inform others of buying decisions
- Keep up with new and old trends
- Learn about new trending companies
Forbes recently performed a study in which consumers responded to different businesses on social media platforms. In the end, nearly 81 percent of the study showed that the interactions between the consumer and the business impacted their buying decision.
Why is Social Media Such a Big Influencer?
The decision to buy something is a lot more complex than it seems. To understand why social media is such a big influence, we must first look at the psychology behind people’s actions. In general, modern psychologists agree on the following reasons as to why social media is such a big influence.
- Crowd Mentality: People often opt to stick with the group because there is safety in numbers. This means that it is easier to influence people in groups, which is why social media is great for marketing. It is easier to convince somebody to buy something if their peers have already purchased it. The only thing companies need to do is to show consumers how their product has benefitted their peers. Research has shown that a majority of shoppers are influenced by the positive reviews of family, friends, and other shoppers.
- Emotional Decisions: All consumers are influenced by their emotions to a certain degree, no matter how much they pretend not to be. Most decisions use a combination of both the logical left brain and the subjective right brain when making decisions. Almost half of people who purchase a product say they had no plans to do so. They just happened to come across it and decided to buy it. This is because their emotions took hold, and they made a decision without planning and analyzing first. Even when one plans ahead with purchases, there is some emotional element to it.
- Images: Pictures, graphics, and other visuals influence consumers and make them more likely to purchase a specific product. These visuals are very easy for companies to share, and they have a positive impact on buyers.
- Natural Suspicion: Consumers and people, in general, are naturally suspicious. This is one reason why they are hesitant to buy things when a salesperson tells them to. A company must first establish its trust and credibility with their consumers before they try to get them to do something. This is where social media comes in. A person can get to know a business through their posts before making a purchase. This is also where family and friend recommendations come in. Consumers are being influenced by people they trust.
How Consumers Personally Define a Brand
Unfortunately, consumers are extremely unpredictable, and it can be hard to determine how each one interprets a brand. Since everyone's mind works differently, it can be hard to appeal to every consumer interest and concern. However, some things can help define a brand and make up its personal definition:
- Emotionally reinforcing the concept of the brand through the various types of advertising
- Designing a concept for a brand that can link the company to a positive phrase or a single word that can properly describe it
One of the biggest factors that influence the way the consumer thinks about the company is the consumer’s perception of the brand rather than fitting the company to one single idea. Also, it’s the job of the digital marketer to create a positive experience around the brand to help generate more sales.
How to Use Your Content to Influence Purchasing Decisions
The point of good digital marketing is not only to influence somebody to buy your product but also to make them want to purchase from you in the future. You must use your content and what it says about you to build your brand. Here are a few tips on ways to build up your brand and influence the greatest number of potential buyers and their purchasing decisions.
- Target Millennials: To effectively use social media, you need to know your audience. Millennials makeup one of the largest consumer groups and are the most prominent users of social media. However, they are also notoriously hard to win over with traditional marketing and branding. This makes it hard for most companies to connect with them. However, that also means there is a lot of room for growth.
- Create your Brand Around Conversation: One of the best things about social media is that it allows consumers to see the personal touch behind a brand and feel a genuine connection to it. Certain social media platforms make it very easy to interact and converse with customers.
- Don’t Alienate Offline Customers: Social media and other types of digital marketing for business are vitally important, but you cannot overlook your offline customers either. Take these consumers into account when crafting your marketing plan and tie your offline marketing efforts in with your online ones.
Here at Bright Vessel, we fully understand the importance of creating a unique digital marketing plan to help reach your consumers and continue the strength of your brand. Feel free to contact us today to learn more about how content marketing strategies can benefit your company.
