In an age where trends shift more rapidly than the weather, understanding who your customer is – as well as what makes them tick – is critical to a digital marketer’s success. We need to know who our prospects are, what they enjoy doing online, what they expect from online brands, who they look up to, and what sorts of products they aspire to own.
The digital marketing environment consists of two parts:
- The micro-environment, which is called the operating environment, and
- The macro-environment that is called the remote environment.
The terms ‘environmental scanning’ describes customer behaviour or flow of online visitors amongst search engines, media sites, other intermediaries to a company and its competitors.
Here are the linkage between online business and customer journey:
- Customer segments or target segment
- Search intermediaries or search engines (typically Google)
- Intermediaries and media or publisher sites (aggregators and affiliates)
- Destination sites and platforms – where marketers are trying to attract visitors
The environment and online marketplace analysis is implemented by understanding the current trends and levels of use of the Internet.
This article lays out three activities that digital marketers should undertake in order to better understand their customers:
Assess your data
Your business has customers, even if people aren’t walking through your doors. Take a look at your website or social media analytics, which offers up quite a large amount of customer information. For example, Google Analytics lets you see where your website visitors live, which channels they used to access your website, what tabs they clicked on, whether they used a mobile device or desktop, and even demographics like gender and age. By tabulating this data, you will have a better understanding of who is intrigued by what you have to offer. Information of this nature will also help you build your ideal client personas.