Where and When to Reach Your Customers

We all know that advertising is a way to reach customers and hopefully impact their opinions, actions, and decisions in a positive way. But what is the best way to impact customers before they make a purchase decision? Starcom Mediavest Group dove deep into researching customer activity prior to purchases to discover just that.

Through SMG’s research, they found that customers are highly impacted at all stages of the decision making process through audio and out of home.

From the above graph, you can see the correlation between purchase activity and media usage. Interestingly, each category affects consumers the most at the “consider” and “decide” levels except for television and digital video which highly affect consumers at the purchase point.

Taking a deeper look into the industry’s hot-topic generation, the Millennials (ages 18-34), SMG found that trends tend to be relatively similar. By analyzing the graph below, we can see that Millennials tend to react in a similar way when compared to non-millennial adults.

Surprisingly, television and digital video are the only media outlets where Millennials correlate at a higher level than adults 18+.  Search and social, while being incredibly popular with Millennials, have a correlation that fails to outperform that of the adult group.

For advertisers looking to influence their target audience in a way that will cause them to consider, decide, and purchase a product or service, this information is incredibly relevant and might require some re-strategizing to reach consumers in the most effective manner.