And the poll said…
America’s favorite color is blue.
In fact, 5 of the 10 favorite colors belong to the blue family. Market demographic research like this is considered invaluable when planning product offerings and marketing programs. Surveys are widely used to not only determine customer satisfaction, but also to drive current promotional activity, messaging, and even future production.
Take cars for example. With this color research in hand, you’d think shades of blue would be the most popular car choice. So what was the best-selling car color in three of the last five years? Silver. Blue actually falls further down the list, after white, black, gray, and yes, even brown.
Do you know your prospects and customers well enough to know that more than 90% of them would not buy a blue car? Would even more surveys and market demographic information help? There seems to be a huge gap between what prospects and customers say in a survey and what they actually do when they take action. So how can you track and anticipate their behavior? Drop the demographics crutch and move on to behavioral targeting.
Follow that click!
You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that what a customer clicks (or doesn’t click) is a good indicator of their level of interest.
Behavioral targeting is based on this observation of activity and response, and adjusting your message to fit. Sometimes called contextual advertising or behavioral marketing, the concept is the same: quantify online activity as an indicator of purchase intent.
As a simple example, consider an email newsletter. If reader “A” clicks on an article and then clicks back to read about a product on your website, they are more likely to be a potential customer than reader “B” who didn’t respond. If your salesperson only had time for one call, who would you want it to be?
Gathering this information is now made easy and inexpensive by applying some software tools to your website, email, and other online advertising.
With this data in hand, you identify the most likely prospects, know what specific products or topics interest them, and even the best time to follow up. Behavioral targeting is all about building a relevance relationship along the path of your customer’s buying behavior. Good salespeople intuitively know that selling is all about relationship and timing, and now good salespeople and salespeople can take advantage of simple behavioral tools to improve both.
Marketing right in the mind
Think of it as “Right in Mind” marketing. Much like just-in-time manufacturing, where a manufacturer hates to have resources idle, paying for and stocking parts long before the product actually goes into production, a company no longer has to spend all its valuable dollars on advertising and marketing. usually. based on marketing and branding tactics that are mostly irrelevant to what the viewer is interested in at that moment. Delivering appropriate sales and marketing messages along the path to purchase increases both effectiveness and efficiency, resulting in a higher and more measurable ROI.
Where reach, frequency, and awareness are useful demographic metrics, behavioral metrics focus on recent response, frequency, and conversion. How many people expressed interest? Of those, how many tried it? And of those, how many did they buy?
Just as operational logistics has brought components to factory production floors the day they are needed, behavioral marketing can deliver relevant customer communications and offers at the most relevant points of interest, consideration, and purchase, often with a small additional expense and with a significant increase. returns.
strength in numbers
Last month, eMarketing projected spending of more than $1.2 billion on online behavioral advertising in 2006, a number that surpassed the $2 billion mark two years later. The net benefit of behavioral targeting is clear:
1. Behavioral targeting improves advertising, marketing, and sales productivity—get more results with less exposure
2. Users find targeted ads more relevant to their needs and therefore pay more attention – a vital resource in the oversaturated marketplace.
3. Relevance is a proven factor in increasing revenue
Last year, IT and telecommunications companies found that brand recognition and recall increased by 40-200% when employing behavioral marketing strategies instead of regular campaign tactics. Major pharmaceutical companies report that one of the top three drivers of growth is professional education. This can be accomplished through email to inform both parties: what topics are hot among clinicians and what new areas are pharmaceutical companies investigating? Lastly, any product line can drive sales through new apps or industry promotion through custom email solutions.
According to a 2005 Market Wire report, when Volkswagen undertook a blended demographic and behavioral marketing approach, “behavioral targeting resulted in a 35% increase in conversion rates for those consumers who visited the site and set up a site.” car and a 27% increase in conversion rates. for consumers requesting information from a local dealer.” Although the report did not indicate how many consumers configured blue cars, the data is certainly there.
At the small business level, a recent case study showed that a state office of economic development was able to increase sales of business seminars by 30%, after implementing simple behavioral targeting software for email marketing campaigns based on Outlook and along with your website.
The numbers are there. The tools are there. Isn’t it time you started?
Why not start with email?
Behavioral targeting doesn’t have to be a big project; in fact, due to its very nature, it is easy to implement on a small or even individual scale. Today, there is even inexpensive behavior tracking software available for Microsoft Outlook that allows you to track behavior and take appropriate follow-up action.
Your company may already be doing other ways of doing this. Buying Google AdWords campaigns is one method. The keywords you buy are within the context of the research people are doing online. Purchasing an online banner placement today typically comes with a behavioral placement option, rather than just on-site purchases. Once you get customers to click through to your site, you can use customer recognition software or web analytics to identify patterns of behavior and report on activity. Email marketing software is another useful tool, and if you track click behavior, you can identify patterns and groups or segments of opportunities. Eventually, you’ll want to get more sophisticated and gather all of this activity into a database and create automatically targeted campaigns.
The beauty of such behavioral targeting approaches is the objective measurement. It is no longer about what people say they will do; it’s about what they actually do. This is real-time market research on which immediate action is taken. The costly gap between generating initial interest and signing a deal can be significantly reduced through active and behaviorally targeted communications.
My behavior manifesto
Given a marketing survey, I would say that I am a grown woman. My favorite color is blue, my least favorite color is brown, and I am an environmentally conscious consumer. However, if you were to look in my driveway, you would see that I drive a brown pickup truck. It’s also a V8, and you could understand why if you knew that every morning I click on the Moto GP results. I’ve heard rumors that a hybrid pickup is coming to market. I’ll research it online. My lease is up in nine months. Will your marketing be here when I want it? Will I receive any email about it?