Marketers Guide to Understanding Consumer Perception

Marketing can be difficult at times due to the complexity of the human mind. Although customer thoughts are dynamic, they tend to converge when showing certain emotions and behaviors.

Many of these complex thoughts and behavioral patterns can be grouped together into a concept known as consumer perception. It tells businesses what consumers think and feel about their brand and its product offerings. To know the perception of consumers towards a brand, marketers turn to surveys, reports, and tools. Marketers who use such resources to better align their marketing strategies end up as winners.  Hence, every marketer should give consumer perception the top-most priority.

A marketer who understands consumer perception can perform tasks such as audience segmentation and run targeted marketing campaigns for more conversions. Consumer-centric brands take necessary measures to keep them updated about how the market is feeling to help them anticipate risks, stay relevant, and maximize the rewards from their marketing efforts.

In this article, we will be discussing consumer perceptions, why they are important to marketers, and how to understand them.

Gathering Information through Personalized Surveys, Forms, CTAs

The best way to know what a customer thinks about you is by asking them. Brand tracking tools use personalized surveys and provide an opportunity to ask your customers the questions that you need answers to.Such data can help you to identify key segments amongst your target audience and cut

through the noise to ask consumers directly about what they think about your brand.

Another way to collect this data is by using forms with questions that help you dig deeper into the minds of consumers. Use an effective CTA (Call To Action) to ask them to fill and submit the forms.

Where Automation Meets Scalability

Marketers can use marketing automation tools to automate their marketing activities. Most marketers automate repetitive tasks like social media posting, email marketing, and ad campaigns. This creates efficiency, scales marketing activities, and helps the marketers to provide a personalized experience to customers. Marketing automation technology has made this easier. For example, a marketer can use a marketing automation tool to schedule social media ads to be posted at a time when most of their target audience is online.

A 2020 report from ResearchAndMarkets shows that the global marketing automation market size will reach $8.42 billion by 2027, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of 9.8% from 2020 to 2027.

Marketing automation can help marketers to scale their marketing activities and reach a wider audience. The good thing with marketing automation tools is that they support audience segmentation for marketers to run customized brand awareness campaigns. If done well, marketers can create a good consumer perception over a wider audience for the benefit of their brand.

Brand Awareness and Proper Product Placement

Brand awareness refers to the degree to which consumers in the market are familiar with a particular brand. Most businesses promote the awareness of their brands through advertisements.  Brand awareness has an impact on consumer perception, and working on brand awareness is important for the success of any business.

Consumers perceive highly advertised brands to offer higher quality products than generic brands that have not been seen before. For example, grocery stores present consumers with many options for individual products, ranging from highly advertised brands to generic products. Shoppers are most likely to view high-priced brands as superior to store brands, even if they both contain similar ingredients. Highly advertised brands are also perceived to be easily available.

Product placement is a good technique for making sure that brands reach their target audiences without using overtly traditional advertising. For example, when the lead actor in a movie uses clearly labeled Samsung cell phones or drinks clearly labeled Coca-

Cola beverage. Product placement has a positive impact on brand recognition and perception.

The Journal of Management and Marketing Research (JMMR) found that 57.7% of television viewers recognized a brand in a placement when the brand was also advertised during the show. To improve consumer perception, it will be good for you to place your brand in more emotional programs. The positive association between the viewer and the show can positively influence their perception of the brand.

Leveraging Consumer Insights Based on Action and Data

The process of interacting with customers doesn’t end after making a sale or after the close of a contract. Your customers carry insights about their experience with your brand. A marketer who taps into these insights can grow his business since they will provide him with information about where improvements are needed, where they have done well, and the next steps that should be taken. For example, after analyzing your customer data, you may realize that they are complaining about poor customer service. You can then take immediate actions with your CS team based on the feedback to improve the consumer experience.

Consumer insights tell businesses about what their audience feels and thinks about them. They can also help businesses know what consumers need. The business can then take the necessary measures to help them meet the needs of the consumers. This can influence the perception of consumers towards your brand.

Finding the Right Data for Better Predictive Strategy

Customer data can be used for predictive analytics. In predictive analytics, a business analyzes the historical data about a brand to forecast future happenings. This can help the business to prepare adequately for future events for a better response and maintain consumer perception. However, for a business to benefit from data, it must choose the right data. Cross-industry studies reveal that only less than half of structured data is used in decision-making. Over 70% of employees also have access to data that they should not access.

For a business to perform predictive analytics, it must use brand tracking tools to help them collect and analyze historical data about its brand. Examples of brand tracking tools include Latana, Brand 24, BrandsEye, Mentionlytics, and others. They can also use these tools for audience segmentation to ensure that they only track the needed data for the brand.

Brand Preference and Why It Matters

Brand preference is a marketing metric that reflects the consumer perception of a particular brand. For example, why do you choose Apple over Android, or vice versa? It’s because of brand preference. This metric tells whether consumers prefer this brand over others in the same category.

Brand preference is important for a business that wants to create repeat customers from their target audience as it creates brand awareness and helps brands to develop strong support. It also means that brand preference and brand perception go hand-in-hand.

Establishing brand preference in the market can help a business to increase revenue, profit, and market share. It also plays a great role in building brand equity which determines the popularity and strength of a brand in the market against its competitors.

As a marketer, you should conduct market research to know the motivations behind consumer purchasing behaviors to help you drive the brand preference of your products.

Conclusion

Consumer perception refers to what consumers think and how they feel towards a particular brand. It is very important for marketers. The goal of any marketer should be to create a positive consumer perception towards their brand. This can drive sales and conversions. However, to improve consumer perception, the marketer must understand consumers properly. The best way to achieve this is by the use of audience analysis tools such as Latana, Google Analytics, Followerwonk, Keyword Tool, Talkwalker Alerts, SEMrush, and others.  These tools give marketers deep insights about their target audience so as to create customized ads and improve consumer perception towards their brand.