Before you can influence the behavior of existing and potential online customers, you must understand what drives their behavior. You need to understand the brands they favor and why, how they shop for them, what they expect as online consumers and other aspects of consumer behavior. Today’s consumers venture far beyond the websites where they shop. This place in cyberspace holds the key to understanding why online shoppers do what they do.
The 3P Approach
In visiting this vast space, categorizing all that happens there into 3 P’s makes it possible to influence consumer behavior in your favor. These are the 3 P’s of tracking your digital ecosystem.
- Property
This refers to the tools you have at hand for achieving your goals. There are different types of tools. One is the property that you control fully like your website. Second is property that you have partial control over such as your social media platforms. Third, there is property you have no control over such as consumer reviews about your brand or product.
- Path
This is about the role that the different types of property play along the path to achieving the goal of consumer conversion. There are three questions to ask here:
- Which property do you expect consumers to encounter first when they are looking at your product or brand online?
- Where do consumers go once they make a purchasing decision?
- What does a consumer experience once they choose to buy from you?
- Purpose
Purpose is about identifying the properties of your customers and how you will measure the success of your marketing strategy.
Let’s assume that your purpose is to convert visitors to customers. Here, the measure of success would be to compare your leads with actual sales. A second example would be where the purpose is to endorse or even deter other consumers. In this case, the measure of success would be the ratio of positive comments to the ratio of negative comments.
In Conclusion
There are millions of web browsers at any time. If you can work out the 3 P’s, you can work out how to capture their attention and e-wallets. Competition for online customers between merchants is always fierce, but a grasp of the 3 P’s will give you an edge that you can use to understand and influence online shoppers.
