How Your Local Buyers Make Decisions
Local buyers behave in some pretty predictable ways even with all of technological changes that there have been in communication. These buyers have a specific need that they’re trying to fulfill and go to the internet to take care of it. Those businesses that can meet the buyers with the right message will win. This process of “meeting the buyer” isn’t complicated although the competition is fierce.
All Businesses Have Access to Internet Marketing Strategies
As the classification of internet marketing matures, its strategies have become known to most business owners. You’ve seen these strategies in newspapers, trade publications and business magazines being discussed in various ways. Unfortunately, those discussions aren’t organized in any particular order.
That means that one week you’ll hear about “how to successfully use social media”. The next week you’ll hear about a strategy on “how to successfully select a SEO consultant”. And finally, you probably read in numerous articles about what you need to do to get ready for “the mobile revolution”.
All of these strategies are only parts of a whole plan. What is most important is that you understand how your typical buyer makes the decision to buy the products and services that you sell. That will help you to determine how all of these strategies fit together for your business.
Finding Out Who Your Buyer Is
Doing some research on your typical buyer will go a long way toward deciding what kind of marketing strategies are going to have the most success. That doesn’t mean that you need to pay a large marketing firm for this information. You can do a great job of gathering this research yourself, by setting up online surveys and sending an e-mail to your customers to take them.
You basically want to know a couple of things. First, you’ll want to know how they came to find out about your business. And then 2) you’ll want to know about their most recent purchase with you. You should try to find out about what drove their decisions to do business with you. This is important because you’ll be getting a sense for how you’re getting people to come to your location and make the decision to buy.
In addition to getting information on their decision-making, you’ll want to know who your buyer is. Finding out their age and gender is often key to being able to discern some of their preferences.
While this information won’t be an exact predictor of future buyer decision-making, you will be able to learn from trends and patterns as more of your buyers return surveys to you. The downside to this, of course is that you may never get a significant number of your customers to return your surveys. This will delay you in getting the help you need to tweak your marketing campaigns.
Working with Professionals
One shortcut to getting the kind of information that is typically gathered by large research firms, is to work with people who have access to large scale marketing studies and information. Industry professionals often subscribe to research firms whose job it is to find out what goes into buyer decisions. These research firms survey millions of different kinds of buyers and then report this data the industry professionals that subscribe. Local marketing consultants and their companies often subscribe to multiple services that provide this kind of information.
By working with local marketing consultants, you can often get access to some of this valuable information without having to pay the exorbitant fee that a research firm would charge you. In addition to this, most marketing consultants will help you to bring context to the statistics. In other words, they will help you to apply the information from the research firm to your individual business.
