Impact of Digital Marketing on Consumer Behavior
In today’s constantly evolving digital landscape, businesses have learnt to let go of their traditional methods and heavily adopted digital marketing strategies. The growth of the digital sphere as well as the incredible online influx of businesses and users have driven brands to strive in trying to get to know their customers more deeply. This pursuit has led them to employ various tactics to study and analyze consumer behaviors, needs, habits and preferences, which in turn helps brands cater to their potential and existing customers in a better manner. Naturally, this is bound to strengthen customer relationships and boost customer loyalty and retention. However, this is not the only way in which digital marketing affects consumer behavior. Digital Marketing has proven time and again that it has the power and potential to inherently alter consumer psychology and fundamentally change their purchasing habits. Brands have used digital marketing to equip themselves with the ability to create markets where did not previously exist and make customers out of unlikely prospects. The following article will explore a list of some of the compelling and impressive ways in which digital marketing has had an impact on changing consumer behavior.
How does digital marketing influence consumer psychology?
- Increased Awareness – A while ago, brands had slowly started to increase transparency in order to stand out from their competitors and give a unique digital experience to users. With more businesses following the example, people began to grow more aware about technical aspects and also expected the same kind of information from every brand. Today, customers are way more tech-savvy and well-informed than they used to be a few years ago. They perform in-depth online research and visit innumerable websites and brands before making a decision.
- Novelty & Experimentation – With countless brands and businesses cropping up in the digital landscape, users are faced with an abundance of options. In some ways, this plenitude has spoiled them for variety and novelty. People now perpetually crave new experiences and products and brands are challenged with the problem of inconsistent customer loyalty. They prefer experimenting from time to time and do not appreciate repetitive or generic things. To retain their attention, brands keep coming up with unique and quirky campaigns and try staying up to date with all the latest online trends. This basically creates an endless cycle of boredom and seeking easily available novel experiences.
- Increased Engagement & Personalization – Brands now practice something called Social Listening or Social Media Listening very widely. It refers to the process of monitoring online conversations or mentions around your brand, and even the market as a whole. It helps businesses understand their audiences better and cater to them accordingly while also analyzing their market position and work on ways to improve it. Such practices have led to fostering increased user engagement and participation through various channels. Advertising via storytelling methods, putting out polls to ask for suggestions and opinions from customers, creating relatable social media content that is open to user comments, having open interactions with customers, etc. are some of the ways in which this is carried out. This has practically made people expect each brand to perform similar functions and politely request for customer feedback and contribution to the brand in some way. If brands don’t work on building close connections with their customers, people are no longer interested in staying loyal to their product or service.
- Impulsive Buying Behavior – Impulse buying is when people act on the sudden urge to buy something without any prior thought or planning. In most cases, this is an unconscious consumer purchasing behavior that is predominantly associated with emotions. Social media marketing through various platforms, formats and influencers evokes a lot of negative feelings of inadequacy and positive feelings of desire that lead someone to instantly add to cart before performing an extensive analysis. Digital marketing tactics manage to convince them that they need something immediately to feel satisfied and keep themselves from missing out on all the best things everybody else is using.
- Word-of-mouth / Testimonials – The decision-making process has become increasingly difficult while people look for a specific thing online. Every brand competes with the best features and services which makes differentiation quite challenging. In such cases, testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing have acted as game-changers. Digital marketing strives to get brands mentioned by as many people as possible and get word around about their excellence as this can strongly influence people’s buying decisions and current consumer behavior trends.
- Higher Expectations & Speedy Evolution – Digital marketing trends like the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), influencer marketing, ethical and inclusive marketing, personalized marketing, and many more are actually raising the bar for audiences. Consumer expectations have skyrocketed and they demand more from brands each time. This hastens the rate of changes in digital marketing trends and evolution of new developments and technologies.
- Impatience – The best brands provide the most efficient and engaging services to their customers. There are better, more interactive and attractive features available on the websites of almost all the prime brands. This is again a matter of generating higher expectations leading to lower patience among users. If businesses are unable to keep up with industry trends and offer the quickest and most refined user experiences, then customers will not think twice before moving onto the next best thing.
- Privacy Concerns – With increased awareness come greater inhibitions. Since users have understood the ways in which their online activity is closely monitored and their data is used by search engines and brands, they have become extremely cautious and in some cases, unwilling to allow access to it. While digital marketing raises data privacy concerns among users, this in turn also affects the functioning of campaigns.
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