Understanding buyer intent using data analytics

Data analytics professionals and search-engine optimization experts have now moved on from technical strategies and tactics for optimizing websites, and have begun to take a different approach called ‘buyer intent’. Understanding buyer intent helps in improving search results by delivering the most relevant information about customers based on the search query they enter.

With the grand alliance of marketing and technology in mid 1990s, began the saga of marketing technology. And nothing in the marketing landscape remained the same. The range of products, the way of selecting products, and the way of buying products, all changed. And all of it has changed heavily in favor of the buyers. This has created a complex environment of data; data that’s pertinent to understanding the buyer intent or behavior. But a complex environment calls for careful and calculated navigation, and that’s exactly why we need data analytics.

Importance of data analytics in marketing today Data analytics helps you converse with your data and understand what the data has got to narrate. It helps break a macro picture into a micro one. Data analytic software applications such as Tableau , MATLAB, and Scilab are gaining quick popularity with every business that thinks. While your data may inform you of the sales generated by your organization over a period of time, only data analytics can tell you how to maintain or elevate those sales figures. But what we are looking at here is data that goes beyond those figures on your annual sales report, because that data only reflects the outcome. Right here, we are looking at the data that drives the outcome. Data, that helps understand buyer behavior.

The importance of buyer intent Now, buyer behavior could be a tricky data entity. But at the same time, understanding buyer behavior is important to gauge buyer intent. Waiting for the buyer to approach a business is the most outdated of approaches that a business could opt for. Moreover, even reaching out to a buyer at the wrong time or with the wrong product, could be equally destructive for your business. Today’s buyer does not use the traditional funnel method to make a purchasing decision. There are way too many points in his decision journey where he can be influenced, consequently changing his purchasing decisions completely.

Using data analytics With such high stakes, data analytics can be employed to understand buyer intent in the following ways:

Data analytics to know what buyers are looking for:

Marketers must use data analytics for finding out the products popular with buyers who matter to them. This will help marketers understand the taste of their existing or potential buyers, and pitch their products accordingly.

Data analytics to know when buyers are looking for a product:

In marketing, timing is everything! When you approach a buyer, timing is as important as the product being pitched. Because obviously, you don’t want to lose out on business simply because the buyer was too occupied with other things, or that the buyer is still not in a place where he finds your product relevant, or even worse, your product is obsolete for him already. Understand the perfect timing to approach a buyer, with data analytics.

Data analytics to find out what information buyer already has:

This is to calculate your next move. You may need to shatter the buyer’s prejudices and/or biases. You can’t sell high-calorie chocolates to a customer who subscribes to latest journals on health and fitness, unless you are already prepared to prove how high-calorie chocolates could help uplift their mood! That’s the kind of preparation that data analytics gets you.

Understanding the buyer behavior is not just about data and tools. It’s a research; a deep and time-consuming study. But the greater the time invested in understanding the buyer behavior, the shorter the time to ace the market and leave competitors behind. And the good news is that there are so many different data analytics tools available for understanding the different aspects of buyer behavior. So, you have tons of options to evaluate and educate yourself with!