Behaviour Change Research: Why is it Vital?
Posted by Marketing & PR on 13 Sep 2022
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Research is an important part of any marketing strategy but when it comes to behaviour change research, it is vital. Gaining a deep understanding of your target audience by putting in the research time can help you successfully encourage them to change their behaviour.
A good behaviour change marketing plan relies on customised messages that speak directly to your audience and targets their desires to change, barriers to change and motivations. Developing personas, testing messages and analysing analytics are all important when it comes to behaviour change research for your campaign.
Let’s take a look at some of the strategies you can use to ensure your behaviour change research is thorough and places your campaign in a good position to be successful.
Understanding your audience
This may seem like an obvious place to begin, but it is often overlooked or not given the level of attention it deserves. Truly understanding your audience and creating personas can help you tailor your messages and content to ensure you engage your audience and form a connection.
Strategies that can help you really get to know your audience include in-depth interviews, social media polls and market research. Usually either in person or virtual, in-depth interviews with your potential audience are one of the best ways to understand them. They provide an opportunity to gain real insights into the types of people you want to target.
Include questions that help you gather information on why they want to change a behaviour, what is preventing them from doing it and what could help motivate them i.e. this could be gamification or could be a desire to improve their family life.
The information you gather from these interviews can help you develop key personas for your behaviour change campaign and devise strategies to target each. If interviews aren’t possible then market research and social media polls are the next prong in your approach. While neither are as in-depth as interviews, they can provide good insights into demographics and communication preferences across various target groups.
Testing your communications
Once you have completed the first stage of research, developed your personas and created your key messages to target each group, you now need to put them to the test. Good strategies for doing this can be through focus groups to see how your messages resonate with your target audience or by A/B testing your digital ads - whether through Google or social media.
Both are effective ways to determine whether your messages speak directly to your audience and have the desired outcomes. Focus groups are often the most thorough way to test your messaging but can also be the most costly and time-consuming, so may not always be an option.
Take the time to review analytics
The first two steps of behaviour change research will provide you with a lot of food for thought, and it is crucial that you take the time to analyse your analytics. Doing so will ensure you have a clear view of your audience and can be the difference between your campaign being a success or a failure.
The data you will have collected will all be actionable and even the smallest details can shape your campaign, so be sure to have a plan on how you are going to use this data to its full potential.
Our Expertise
We’ve been creating highly successful social marketing campaigns for our customers for over two decades. We love our work and use the latest marketing communication tools and most current segmentation and customer insight techniques.
This allows us to develop and integrate marketing concepts with other approaches to influence behaviour that benefits individuals and whole communities – for the social good.
Within our team, we have leading nationally recognised academic professionals within Psychology, Mental Health and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that advise what messages and mediums will deliver the best response when we scope out a communications campaign or deliver any targeted communications.
This provides our clients with the reassurance and confidence of knowing that their communication objectives are underpinned by recognised academic behavioural theory, executed with award-winning creative design and using the latest Marketing Automation communication tools, whether it’s on a local, regional or national project.
Perfect Circle has delivered social change for clients like schools, local government, not-for-profit organisations, the health sector and niche commercial businesses, and we’re really proud of what we’ve done so far.
If you’d like our help on your next Behaviour Change Marketing or Social Marketing campaign, we’d love to hear from you. Please visit our contact page and get in touch.
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