People, whether in person or online, enjoy talking and sharing stories. Once you have a few visitors to your store or website, people will talk about your business more frequently than you think. A brand’s every interaction with another person – whether or not that person is a customer – is an opportunity to influence that person’s opinions and actions.
It’s hard to persuade every visitor, but there are ‘influenced consumers’, who are becoming increasingly important to today’s brands. Influenced consumers are more likely to add your product to their wish list than the average customers. Now, the question is where can brands look for these consumers?
Finding Influenced Consumers
Consumers who perceive social advertisements and influencers across platforms to be persuasive in their purchasing decisions make up the majority of this group. While browsing, these customers are frequently stopped in their paths by influencers’ recommendations, which drive them to purchase. The influenced customers are more likely to buy time-saving, popular, and attractive items in their category.
Influenced consumers spend more than 20 hours each week online and prefer watching their favorite streaming networks on their mobile devices. These customers are highly connected; all you have to do is know how to contact them through the appropriate channels. To target this important audience, offer more resonating ideas and strategies. Deeper engagement necessitates not just an awareness of who an audience is, but also what motivates them to make decisions. ‘Influenced consumers’ are driven by a need for conformity, reputation, and excitement.
Brand Curiosity is instinctual
Influenced consumers are more likely to be “brand curious.” Those who are readily swayed are open to new experiences. For brands, this means a huge opportunity to prospect among a rising population of open-minded customers – as long as marketers are ready to respect the specific wants and desires of this easily impressionable audience, and then give them what they want.
Because ‘Influenced customers’ have such a long wish list, they simply try to fit it into their budgets. Influenced Consumers are therefore more inclined to use coupons and fall for offers.
The Value of Influence
Ultimately, you want to see if the consumer influence approach is improving customer acquisition, and if so, how much and how quickly. To calculate the value of influence, you can use the marketing-influenced customer ratio. Marketing-influenced customers are any new customers that marketing nurtured through the funnel. For example, if sales prospected their lead and that lead attended a marketing webinar before becoming a customer, marketing had an impact on that customer. All marketing qualified leads will also be included in the marketing-influenced customer list.
Marketing-influenced customer ratio = (Customers who started as a marketing qualified lead + customers nurtured by marketing) / Total customers acquired
