The area of marketing that small hospitality businesses often struggle with is consumer psychology. We observe our audience through their buying behaviors to understand their purchase decisions, but it seems impossible to predict what they’ll do. It seems clear that the goal is to understand how to influence customer behavior and the truth is, you can’t — but you can try your best to understand what influences it.

As marketers, we are great at communicating with our audience and creating compelling content that just clicks with our customers. Making a successful content strategy, seeing results in our KPIs, and watching our brand come to life are what drive us to feel like successful marketers. But one of the biggest steps to reaching that point is researching our target audience.