With new businesses popping up every minute of every day, consumers are pampered by the number of options they have. We know that high-quality services and products are fundamental to business success, but personalization or curation is just as important nowadays. For consumers, personalization is a form of convenience. Whether it’s finding the perfect song, show, or product — personalization helps consumers find what they want faster. It also enables you to improve your sales! How do we convey and move towards promoting personalization? It’s all about understanding your buyers’ mindsets. Dive in to learn about the different types of buyer mindsets and how to identify the buyers’ mindsets of your own business.
What Are Buyer Mindsets
A buyer mindset is the way consumers are accustomed to purchasing their services or products. Certain buyers are impulsive, and others like to do their research. That’s why there is no single buyer mindset that can fit the needs of everyone.
Being fixated on the utmost amount of personalization can backfire on a business. If you try to please every buyers’ mindset in your content, the content becomes muddied with confusing contradictions. Rather than tackling every buyer mindset that exists, hone-in on the ones most relevant to your brand. We’ll discuss ways to tackle discovering your buyers’ mindset later on in this post.
The Different Types of Buyer Mindsets
Each consumer is a little different, but we can generally boil consumers down to 5 categories. The five types of buyer mindsets are innovators, adopters, early majority, late majority, traditionalists. Understand these fundamental buyer mindsets, and you’ll be able to start personalizing your content effectively.
Innovators
The impulsive friend in the buyer mindset friend group is the innovator. Innovators are willing to experiment with anything new — with or without reviews. Tailor your content towards curiosity, and innovators will be right there with you. However, innovators only make up 2% of the entire marketing demographic. That’s the smallest buyer mindset group we have. Unless your services and products are modern and fresh, it might be best to cater to the other buyer mindsets.
Adopters
Adopters are those that come after innovators. They are more selective of their products and services and will only cave in after careful consideration. Only products and services that will significantly benefit their personal lives or businesses are ultimately purchased.
Because adopters take time to research and review relatively new brands, they are considered more influential than the impulsive innovators. Adopters currently represent 15% of the buyer market.
Early Majority
Slower to try new products than the first two buyer mindsets, these buyers will only consider a brand with a reputation. They are less technology-driven or savvy and aren’t looking for something that will revolutionize their lives. The early majority care about who’s providing them with their products and how reliable that brand is. This group makes up 39% of the buyer market.
Late Majority
While the other three buyer personas are early to the party, the late majority is late. Only after the initial “hype” period ends will the late majority take action. The reason they wait so long is for two reasons: price and universality. By waiting, the late majority can secure universally accepted solutions at lower prices. This group relies on mass media to get their information and is not a part of internet culture. Like the early majority, the late majority makes up another 39% of the market.
Traditionalists
Our last fundamental buyer mindset has an emphasis on frugality. They are the last group to purchase products or services. It is not until prices have reached their lowest values and competition is high the traditionalists take action.
While the other buyer mindsets view products as commodities, traditionalists will not budge unless the product becomes an absolute need. If your product is high-end or will never be considered a necessity, traditionalists will likely be out of your reach regardless of the time factor. Fortunately, traditionalists only make up 5% of the buyer market.
How to Identify Your Buyer Mindsets
The only way to effectively identify your buyer mindsets would be to test out your content. The five fundamental mindsets above can help you narrow down where your product might land, but that’s it. For accurate identification, it’s all about A/B testing. What exactly is A/B testing? This form of testing is when you compare two versions of your website against one another to determine which one performs better. The changes between the versions do not have to be anything tremendous or groundbreaking. Here are some things you could perform during your A/B testing:
– Means of commerce flow
– Videos vs. photos
– Different brand voice in blogs
– Amounts of information on products
– Email subject lengths
– Blog lengths
– Social media frequency
– Types of images
Test and then repeat. With time, you’ll be able to narrow down what your buyers want and don’t want. Once you have more data, you can then confidently identify what buyer mindsets are most prevalent to your brand.
Buyer Mindsets vs. Buyer Personas
Buyer personas have been a buzz term for years now — and with good reason. What’s a buyer persona? A buyer persona is a detailed description of a person that you envision to be your ideal consumer. When forming a buyer persona, brands think about basic demographics, specialties, and potential problems that the ideal consumer will face. But are buyer mindsets and buyer personas different? Which one should you prioritize? For one, these two terms are different. Buyer mindsets describe a consumer’s approach to purchasing a product while a buyer persona is all about the consumer. Second, the best results are when both are equally emphasized. While buyer personas are more trendy in the industry, buyer mindsets are just as important. If both strategies are used effectively, the level of personalization within your brand will surely increase. Because many brands are personalizing at least in some shape or form already, it’s only the most personalized experiences that yield results. That’s why you need to incorporate buyer mindsets as well as buyer personas in your content marketing.
Resources
https://www.bizjournals.com/milwaukee/stories/2003/04/28/smallb2.html
https://medium.com/@drewweddy/6-steps-on-how-to-sell-using-a-buyers-mindset-aeda0d0e6d7a
https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona