We are all familiar with the old road-rage analogy of the congenial, neighbourly man or woman who suddenly becomes a raving speed demon when they get behind the wheel of a car. Well, there is something about the immediacy and anonymity of the digital experience that has a similar effect on people.
It’s always risky to generalize and make assumptions about people – especially in a field as dynamic and fast-moving as this one. The only real way to know your market intimately is to conduct original research within your particular target group. That said, a lot of research work has been done (and continues to be done) on the behavioural traits of online consumers, and a broad consensus has emerged around the key characteristics that epitomize the digital consumer:
1) Digital consumers are increasingly comfortable with the medium: many online consumers have been using the internet for many years at this stage – and while the user demographic is still skewed in favour of younger people, older users are becoming increasingly internet savvy. ‘It’s almost like a piano player who plays faster once they know the instrument. In the beginning people “pling, pling, pling” very carefully, and then they move on to playing symphonies,’ said web usability guru Jacob Nielsen in an interview with the BBC. As people become more comfortable with the medium they use it more efficiently and effectively, which means they don’t hang around for long: your content needs to deliver what they want, and it needs to deliver quickly. Proper use of Keywords will help them find what they are looking for as well as rank up your website in search engines.
2) They want it all, and they want it now: in the digital world, where everything happens at a million miles per hour, consumers have grown accustomed to getting their information on demand from multiple sources simultaneously. Their time is a precious commodity, so they want information in a format that they can scan for relevance before investing time in examining the detail. Designers and marketers need to accommodate this desire for ‘scanability’ and instant gratification when constructing their online offering. Think about ‘value for time’ as well as ‘value for money’.
3) They’re in control: the web is no passive medium. Users are in control more than ever before. Fail to grasp that simple fact and your target audience won’t just fail to engage with you, they will actively disengage. We need to tailor our marketing to be user centric, elective or permission based, and offer a real value proposition to the consumer in order to garner positive results.
4) They’re fickle: the transparency and immediacy of the internet doesn’t eradicate the concept of brand or vendor loyalty, but it does erode it. Building trust in a brand is still a crucial element of digital marketing, but today’s consumer has literally at their fingertips the power to compare and contrast competing brands. How does your value proposition stack up against the competition around the country and across the globe? Your brand identity may be valuable, but if your overall value proposition doesn’t stack up then you have a retention problem, you will lose them out.
5) They’re vocal: online consumers talk to each other... a lot. Through peer reviews, blogs, social networks, online forums and communities they’re telling each other about their positive online experiences... and the negative ones. From a marketing perspective this is something of a double-edged sword – harness the positive aspects and you have incredible viral potential to propagate your message; get it wrong and you could just as easily be on the receiving end of an uncomfortable online backlash.
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