How well do you really know the people visiting your website? If you are only using demographics, you probably don’t know enough about them. The availability of demographic information allows us to reach out to those we think would be most interested in our products.
This is great, but sometimes it doesn’t take you far enough. There is only so much we can learn about a person based on their age, gender, household income, etc. Behavioral targeting takes your media buying and thus your marketing efforts even further.
The Value in Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting becomes really valuable when buying advertising because it allows you to further segment your customer, based primarily on a customer’s own actions. Not everyone visiting your site is viewing and interacting with it in the same way.
Web design allows marketers to guide users through the site initially, but their personal goals and needs will dictate whether or not they stay on your site and read other pages, fill out a contact form, download a whitepaper, make a purchase or just leave the site altogether without exploring it further.
How Behavioral Targeting Works
Love it or hate it, the beauty of online marketing and behavior targeting is that it allows customers to talk to marketers directly through their website actions.
Cookies on the sites mine for data about the users. Information like customer interests, popular products, search terms, and pages can then be incorporated into you digital marketing strategy and future campaigns and marketing efforts.
As media buyers, this information is invaluable and it helps us place your advertising in front of the audiences where our clients will get the most interested viewers and ROI, but you can easily do it too.
How Marketers Can Use Behavioral Targeting
Here are some easy ways to incorporate behavioral targeting data in your campaigns:
- Retargeting: This gives marketers additional opportunities to reengage customers based on their initial web actions. Take advantage of that information so that your next marketing attempt is customized to their behavior. For example, if you notice a customer looking for boots on your retail shoe website, retarget ads for the same or similar boots to get their attention.
- Trigger emails: Worried about too many emails to a prospect? Don’t be. Email marketing campaigns with trigger emails, according to research, have double the clickthrough rate of mass emails. Use these when a customer starts shopping on your site and then suddenly leaves or note milestones (anniversary of signup, birthdays, etc) and reach out to them on those dates.
- Social Media Monitoring: Most social media management tools offer a place where you can monitor your and/or competitor keywords to “listen” to conversations. Use this information to guide your marketing. A few years ago, GAP changed their logo and received backlash on social media. They have since returned to their original logo.
Behavioral targeting is just one of many tools accessible to marketers to help make prospecting and reaching clients easier. Media buying firms also have access to data and technology to connect marketers with their desired audience. For more information, contact Capitol Media Solutions and talk with one of our media strategists about your digital marketing campaign.