B2B or B2C: What copywriters need from marketers for higher converting content
In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, content marketing continues to gain prominence. A recent survey reveals that 71% of B2B marketers consider content marketing to be more important than it was just a year ago. Despite the abundance of advice available to improve underperforming content, a critical component often remains overlooked: audience research, specifically, customer personas and journeys driven by qualitative analytics and insights.
To optimize content relevance and drive customer conversions, marketers must make it a priority to leverage qualitative analytics, which delves into the motivations and decision-making processes that drive purchasing behavior. So let’s consider the significance of qualitative analytics in understanding consumer motivation and buyer decisions while highlighting the differences between correlation and causal statistics.
Qualitative Analytics: Going Beyond the Numbers
Qualitative analytics is a research method focusing on collecting and interpreting non-numerical data, such as consumers' thoughts, feelings, and motivations. By conducting in-depth interviews, focus groups, and other qualitative research techniques, businesses can gain insights into consumers' underlying motivations, preferences, and decision-making processes, which can drive effective marketing strategies.
Understanding Consumer Motivation
Consumer motivation is a crucial aspect of consumer behavior. Qualitative analytics enables businesses to understand the factors that drive consumer motivation, whether intrinsic or extrinsic. By understanding these factors, marketers can tailor their strategies to resonate with consumers' motivations, leading to increased engagement and sales.
For example, a qualitative study might reveal that customers choose a specific brand of athletic shoes due to their association with accomplishment and personal growth. Armed with this information, marketers can create advertising campaigns that emphasize these values, appealing directly to the motivations of their target audience.
Deciphering Purchase Decisions
Qualitative analytics plays a vital role in understanding the purchase decision-making process. Through qualitative research, businesses can identify the factors that influence consumers at each stage of the decision-making process, such as price, quality, and convenience, and use this information to create targeted strategies that address these factors.
For instance, a business might use qualitative analytics to determine that a significant barrier to purchase is the perception that its product is too expensive. In response, the company could offer limited-time promotions or financing options to alleviate this concern and encourage purchase decisions.
Correlation vs. Causal Statistics: Distinguishing Connections from Causes
In understanding consumer motivation and purchase decisions, it is essential to distinguish between correlation and causal statistics. Correlation refers to the relationship between two variables, while causation indicates that one variable directly causes the change in another.
Quantitative analytics often relies on correlational analysis to identify patterns and relationships between variables. However, correlation does not necessarily imply causation, and this distinction is crucial when attempting to understand the underlying factors that drive consumer behavior.
For example, a quantitative study may show a strong correlation between the amount of time a person spends on a website and the likelihood of making a purchase. While this relationship may be significant, it does not necessarily mean that spending more time on the website causes the consumer to make a purchase. Qualitative analytics can help businesses identify the underlying factors that contribute to this correlation, such as website design, content, or user experience, and help reveal the true drivers of consumer behavior.
Key Takeaways
As Carroll and Seemanns noted, hybrid customer insights from both quantitative and qualitative analytics is the best of both worlds. It still is.
Quantitative insights gleaned from demographics, digital KPIs, social listening, A/B testing and so on are good. But if the marketer’s true goal is to increase conversions at higher rates-- brand awareness, brand activation, sales, repeat sales, market share and ROI—they are not enough to get the job done.
In order for copywriters and content creators to create content that converts, it's essential to have a deeper understanding of the inner world and narratives of the target audience. This allows for a better alignment between a brand's story, promise, and benefits with the audience's values and desires.
This takes qualitative analytic insights every time.
