Guest post by Willi Mays.
While every business has access to marketing data, the capability to use that information varies widely. Organizations are typically at different points of data maturity at different stages in their growth, and they differ in the ways they choose and are able to leverage the data available.
But in general, modern organizations have access to huge amounts of data that can be put to better and more active utilization.
Technology, metrics, behavioral sciences, and marketing are at a point today where they can seamlessly merge to produce information that improves both the customer experience and business results.
Behavioral marketing is an old idea. But never before have marketers had access to as much data and advanced tools for analyzing it.
Search, social media, and online journeys can now be combined to connect different aspects of a person’s behavior with their purchasing habits, attitudes, peer influences, and brand loyalty.
What Is Behavioral Marketing?
Consumers may be similar in many ways yet still differ significantly in awareness, preferences, level of engagement, and the advocacy of products and services.
Through most of the Internet era, marketing strategy has been based on specific consumer actions, such as how they found a company’s website, how many pages they viewed, and how long they spent on the site. While this data is certainly useful, it doesn’t provide a complete picture.
This is where behavioral marketing comes in. Apart from looking at page views and time spent, it also analyzes data from sources such as browsing and search history, IP address, cookies (at least for now), and social media activities.
Behavioral marketing data can be combined with traditional sources such as demographic targeting. This helps marketers to link age, gender, education and social status, race and ethnicity, and location to produce a richer, more holistic customer persona.
The objective of behavioral marketing strategies is to promote to the right consumer the exact product he or she is looking for. While marketers haven’t quite got there yet, they’re getting closer. Areas that can be successfully tracked include past purchases, preferred device, which clicks and calls to action (CTAs) work, and the IP address/location of the customer.
These strategies help to segment the market, according to behaviors observed and recorded online. For instance:
- Time and occasion
- Frequency of visits
- Items frequently searched for
- Interest and engagement level
- Stage of journey through the website
- Customer satisfaction
- Loyalty
- Advocacy of your brand on social media and online reviews
The potential benefits of behavioral marketing, or behavioral targeting, are immense. Personalization is a huge draw. More than 50% of consumers report that they receive unnecessary marketing emails. They would prefer to engage with brands and vendors who provide personalized marketing messages, rather one-size-fits-all generalized email blasts.
More than half of those surveyed in a recent study say they think personalization is valuable, and a large number like to shop in stores that offer personalized marketing recommendations. Surprisingly, 79% of respondents report that they have no problems giving out their personal information if there is some benefit to be gained from it.
Marketers can use behavioral data to ramp up sales; provide more useful, relevant and authoritative content; analyze the average order value to segment high-value customers from lower ones; plan for future development; and predict customer behavior and brand engagement in the future.
What Is A Social Media Marketing Campaign?
Social media campaigns are like a boost of high-octane fuel into your marketing strategy. They can be part of a highly coordinated strategy to reinforce the information available to consumers, plug into emotional aspects of purchasing, and connect purchasers with others who share their needs, preferences, and budgets.
These campaigns can be concentrated in a single social media platform such as Twitter or Instagram, or they can roll out across multiple ones simultaneously in a calibrated manner.
It’s vital to time your social media campaign right, to catch trends at the perfect time and place. Brands can suddenly explode on social media driven by trends, fads, or events, and if your campaign is on the spot to take advantage, you’re well on your way to positive results.
User-generated content on social media can be incredibly valuable. You don’t need to create everything yourself – you can create a pool of visual images, testimonials, reviews, videos, etc. along with that prized personalization impact.
Applying Behavioral Marketing to your Social Media Campaign
Behavioral marketing can be taken a step further to move into areas such as behavioral change.
Social media is so ubiquitous now that people are more connected than ever before in human history, across geographies, time zones, cultures, ages, and income levels.
Using the power of social media to drive your marketing campaign is a brilliant idea provided you get it right.
Consumer digital culture, the impact of social media on consumer behavior, responses to digital advertising, how people are influenced by social media, and the digital environment are elements that can be leveraged to promote your company’s marketing goals and strategies.
Social media enables direct two-way communication between your company and the consumer in ways and at a scale never before possible. It provides the ability to communicate with consumers using text, images, video, podcasts, and any combination of these formats.
People reveal more and more of their personal lives and information on social media, giving marketers amazing insight into what drives their purchasing and consumer behaviors.
The environment is highly dynamic and ever-changing, driven by advances in mobile technology, new platforms, and the nature of social media itself.
Behavior-based social media campaigns are also great for the long haul. They have the potential to build durable brand loyalty through the use of personalized, relevant, authoritative, credible, reliable, and fresh content.
Another obvious benefit is website traffic. Social media campaigns based on behavioral targeting help to channel more and higher quality visits.
Ultimately, behavioral targeting combined with empathy and creativity enables your brand to build increased buyer trust, loyalty and predictability.
Willi Mays is a digital marketing expert and content writer. She loves to share her knowledge with others. Beside her regular work she loves to read novels, poems and historical fiction.