What is buying behavior?
Buying behavior is used as a concept in the world of sales and marketing and refers to the behavior of customers. For example, a customer's buying behavior will be expressed in a customer's decision-making process when he/she is faced with buying a product or service.
Researching your customers' buying behavior is about becoming skilled at understanding their thoughts, motives, needs, dreams, fears and issues and addressing them with one of your products or services that can help them.
Researching customer buying behavior is both relevant for physical vs online businesses, as well as B2B vs. B2C-companies.
Why do I need to know about buyer behavior?
You need to know your customers' individual buying behavior if you want to get better at delivering exactly what the customer needs - whether it's a conscious or unconscious lack. If you can figure this out, there is a much higher chance that the customer will place their order in your store.
This means that once you know your customers' buying behavior, it's easier to target your marketing and communication specifically to that customer.
In this text, the purpose is to make you a lot smarter about how to become skilled at analyzing your customers' buying behavior so you can sell more!
Buying behavior analysis based on the SOR model
It's safe to say that no one can afford to lose sleep over gaining better insight into their customers' buying behavior. It can be a complex matter, which is why some companies choose to get an agency to help. That said, it doesn't mean it's impossible to work with it internally if you have the resources to do so.
There are different models, but you can start with the SOR model, which aims to help you lure your customers closer to a purchase based on insights into their buying behavior.
In the SOR model, S stands for stimuli, O stands for organism and R stands for response.
Stimuli refers to the influence you apply to potential customers through your marketing activities, communication, etc. Organism is the potential customer that you capture with your influence, while response is the reaction you get back to the influence you have planted in the potential customer.
If you are aware of this process, it will be easier for you to understand and adjust the response you get, because it depends primarily on the stimuli you set in motion.
Note! That there is a big difference between the buying behavior, buying process and types of buying behavior in B2B companies and B2C companies. Therefore, you need to be aware of which type of buying behavior analysis you need to prepare. In the consumer market (B2C), end users/consumers trade with a company, whereas in the producer market (B2B), companies trade with each other. The way these two operate in the market with their customers is very different.
