What Is Behavioral Marketing and Why Should You Use It?
Imagine a world where you could sell a service to a client who’s looking to buy exactly what you sell.
If such a world existed, it would represent the holy grail of marketing. Instead of spending money on expensive advertising campaigns, marketers would simply find who needs what they have to sell, and they would sell it to them.
Unfortunately, such a world doesn’t exist. But there’s a marketing technique that has allowed marketers to create better targeted, more effective messages that are very likely to resonate with prospects and potential clients.
The technique is called behavioral marketing, and in this article, we’ll show you what it is and why you should consider using it in your marketing campaigns.
What is behavioral marketing?
Behavioral marketing is marketing that’s based on the actual behaviors of your audience. You can use website activity, purchase activity, and activities from third-party applications to tap into how your potential clients are engaging with your brand.
Online marketing provides incredible insights – you can track and measure what potential clients do from the first moment they visit your website up to the point of purchase or contact. With the help of tools such as web analytics, heat maps, and user recordings, you can uncover vast amounts of insights from the actual behaviors of your potential clients which you can then use in your marketing campaigns.
In other words, you take all the information you have from your users and use it to build a more realistic profile of them, which you can use to tailor your marketing messages better.
Behavioral marketing works because users receive messages tailored to them. In a world where 50% of people feel they receive too many emails, these personalized campaigns make a difference.
According to Invesp, 53% of online shoppers think personalization is valuable, 45% prefer shopping with stores that give personalized recommendations, and 57% wouldn’t mind giving their personal info if they benefited from it.
Behaviors to track
If you want to use behavioral marketing, you have to track what prospects, subscribers, and current clients are doing. Here are some of the most common behaviors that marketers look at:
Past clients: You can use your client history to create better service recommendations, send them discounts, and other marketing messages to increase their loyalty.
Device: You can adapt your marketing based on the device on which the user visits your website. If they come via tablet, you might send them tablet-friendly content, for example.
Clicks: Where are your customers clicking? Which CTAs work for them? You can use this information to create more relevant messages.
IP and location: Based on the location of the user, you can then create ads that “follow” them around the city they are in as well as cater ads that include the location in the creative.
The more specific the behavior and the more information you have at your disposal, the better. If you take the time on page, a broad and ambiguous site-wide metric, as your main behavior, it will be hard for you to make your marketing more effective. On the other hand, if you segment the people who opened your last five email campaigns as people who are engaged with your brand to send a special campaign with a special offer, you can probably expect a positive response from your engaged subscribers.
How you can use behavioral marketing
Behavioral marketing is a strategy that encompasses many different tactics. One tactic that we are sure will make a difference in your next marketing campaign?Be sure to use personalized content.
Your audience will get irritated if you send them irrelevant content. How do you send campaigns your subscribers actually want to see?
One way to improve the relevancy of your content is through personalization. With personalization, you can send the right content to the right audience at exactly the right time.
According to a Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study, when retailers add content personalization to their event-triggered campaigns, they see a 667% ROI.
Marketers can personalize campaigns using:
- A subscriber’s gender
- A subscriber’s location
- A subscriber’s income level
- Past purchases
- Average order value from previous purchases
Wrap up
Behavioral marketing represents a new way to carry out your marketing strategy. By taking the behaviors of your website visitors and potential clients, you can offer more relevant content that encourages them to want to do business with you.
You have seen how powerful behavioral marketing works, how to use it, and how powerful it can be. Now it’s time you get started. Pick one of the tactics shown in this article, and start making your marketing more relevant. Or, if you would like our expert team to help take your marketing efforts to the next level, connect with us today.