The point of marketing is to give you precise ideas as to who your customers are, where they are located, how you can reach them, and how to get them to spend money. It is a broad way of saying that marketing helps you to learn who your customers are and how you can best sell to them. But marketing is also there to help you figure out what your customers are interested in to gets sales moving along and help improve your products. It used to be tricky to figure out what your consumers are interested in, but advances in digital media have made that easier to figure out.
Big data has helped open a lot of doors in digital marketing, and that includes predicting consumer trends with significant accuracy. Using numbers to try and figure out what customers really wanted used to be a hit or miss game, but the collection of significant data from a consumer’s life activities makes it much easier to predict what products they will buy in the future, and what types of features customers want. For example, collecting data on what types of product advertisement consumers respond to the most helps companies to understand what types of products will be popular.
One of the side-effects of big data has been the development of software that collects information from social media posts and turns it into marketing data to predict consumer trends. In many ways, collecting social media information can be a much more powerful way of understanding what consumers are really looking for in the products they buy. By being able to grab information from consumer conversations about products, it is easier for digital marketing experts to predict consumer trends.
Even in the age of digital information and Internet marketing, few marketing methods are more reliable than consumer surveys. Digital marketing companies spend a lot of time and money collecting advanced data, but they seem to forget that they can just ask consumers questions as well. You can use website surveys or send surveys out to your existing customer base to get an accurate idea of what your clients are looking for. You can even have people do surveys in your business while people are shopping to find out what consumers are thinking.
The oldest form of establishing consumer trends is to track what sells and go with the big sales items. The two problems with this method is that by the time consumers start buying a product in large quantities, that product is already on its way to being old news. The other problem is that product sales always represent fads as well as trends, and it can be hard to separate the two.
It becomes easier to sell to your target audience when you know in advance what your target audience wants to buy. As technology continues to advance, digital marketing experts are finding it easier to pinpoint consumer trends with accuracy and help businesses to create more effective products. With the help of big data and more advanced marketing software, digital marketing experts are able to deliver consumer trends before they start happening, and that gives manufacturers a big advantage in planning future product lines.
