by shama@camphorsolutions.comFor a long time, numerous businesses have relied on methods of conventional marketing to persuade customers to buy their products. They allocate substantial resources to craft persuasive, wide-reaching advertisements to engage their audience and convert them into customers. Although some ads effectively enhance brand recognition and establish brand value, others do not effectively convey the intended message or motivate the desired response from their target audience.
As technology continues to advance and influence various sectors, the advertising and marketing arena has undergone substantial transformations. Successful marketing now entails a deep understanding of your audience’s identity and their interactions with your company. Merely sending tailored messages based on demographic information or interests is no longer effective. Now, effective marketing requires utilizing data on how your audience engages with your business, known as behavioural targeting.
What is Behavioural Marketing?
Behavioral targeting, also referred to as online behavioral advertising is an approach that enables advertisers and publishers to present pertinent advertisements and promotional messages to individuals based on the browsing actions of their potential customers. This approach enables businesses to focus their marketing efforts on specific customer behaviors, interests, intentions, geographic locations, and various metrics. It leverages data obtained from web analytics, cookies, search history, and other sources to finely categorize audiences. Instead of sending generic messages, organizations can deliver content and promotions that are highly relevant to these segmented audiences. By integrating behavioral targeting with data-driven segmentation, companies can enhance their marketing key performance indicators (KPIs).
How does Behavioral Targeting Work?
As mentioned earlier, behavioral targeting involves the collection of data about a visitor to deliver relevant ads tailored to that individual’s profile. The process of gathering behavioral data, which is essential for effective behaviorally targeted ads, can be accomplished through various means.
However, typically, a Data Management Platform (DMP) is required to aggregate behavioral data related to a website’s visitors. DMPs are responsible for the collection, storage, and organization of data for advertisers. The data used for behavioral targeting can be sourced from various outlets, including websites, mobile apps, CRM systems, and other marketing automation systems. This data may encompass:
- User login details (for registered users)
- IP address and geographical location
- Duration of visits
- Interaction with elements on the site
- Past purchases
- Demographic information
- Content consumed
- Regularly visited sections of the page by a user
- External websites they have visited
Practically all advertisers and publishers can collect some on-site data about their customers and visitors. Understanding how to utilise this information to achieve specific marketing objectives is crucial for effective behavioural targeting.
Significance of Behavioural Targeting
Behavioural targeting strategies aim to enhance engagement, although the desired outcome varies from one business to another. Your objective might be to have site visitors download your app, make a purchase, read more articles, or even subscribe to a service. When your marketing content is customised for visitors based on their observable behavioural patterns, it tends to be much more successful than generic recommendations.
Personalized content, delivered at the right moment, significantly increases the likelihood that your audience will take the desired action. It not only fosters a more engaging and intriguing experience for visitors but also enhances customer loyalty. Hence, Behavioral targeting benefits both businesses and consumers.
Examples of Behavioral Targeting
Cross-selling and Increasing Sales-
Understanding your customers’ preferences and how they interact with your business helps in promoting new products. For instance, if you can establish a connection between products X and Y, your audience interested in product X is likely to engage with an advertisement for product Y.
Behavioral Targeting in Email Campaigns-
Behavioral email campaigns extend beyond programmatic media advertising. You can personalize email marketing based on how your target audience uses your website or app. Examples include targeting users who abandoned their shopping carts, including previously viewed items in regular updates, or referencing previously read content. Behavioral email campaigns enhance email effectiveness and targeting capabilities.
Behavioral Targeting in Remarketing-
Re-targeting is a straightforward approach for implementing behavioural targeting. Recognising website visitors can entice them to return and complete actions on other websites. Platforms like Facebook and Google offer easily installable tracking pixels that can track website visitors. These components can be activated on their respective data management platforms.
Location-Based Targeting-
Location-based targeting reaches specific audiences based on their real-world activities. You can re-target audiences who have visited your business or a competitor’s. This is particularly useful for online retailers and e-commerce businesses. These targeting initiatives hold value as they reveal real-world customer behaviour, allowing you to create engaging segments based on people’s actions.
Types of Behavioural Targeting
Utilizing Website Engagement-
Through website engagement for behavioral targeting, customers could customize the user experience on their website. It entails offering pop-up promotions, advertisements, and links to relevant content. Certain segments of website users could view tailored ads aligned with their interests in products, services, and information. Google remarketing ads offer another means of capitalizing on website engagement by re-engaging visitors who opt out of the website.
Engagement in Marketing Campaigns-
Campaign engagement enables you to target individuals based on their email opening behavior (or lack thereof) and the actions they take, such as clicks. This information can be valuable for refining your audience segmentation. For instance, you can resend emails to those who didn’t open them or to individuals who have displayed low engagement levels. Additionally, you can direct emails to those with the highest average engagement.
Utilizing Purchase Behavior-
Purchase behavior represents one of the most prominent sources of behavioral targeting due to its widespread use and effectiveness. Whether a visitor is on an e-commerce website’s homepage or navigating their shopping cart, it’s common to encounter recommendations for similar products and businesses. This exemplifies how behavioral targeting operates. You can leverage purchase behavior to suggest items that align with shoppers’ preferences, express appreciation, and provide incentives for making a purchase.
Engaging with Apps-
Behavioural targeting plays a crucial role in boosting app engagement by enabling the delivery of personalized marketing messages that encourage increased usage, based on users’ actions or inaction within your app. Furthermore, you can segment users based on their behaviour within a specific time frame. For instance, you can congratulate users in your language learning app who have just completed their first lesson or reach out to users who downloaded your app but haven’t logged in within a week.
Behavioral Vs Contextual Marketing
Behavioral targeting involves the collection of data to create a more tailored experience for your audience. Such precisely targeted advertisements have been proven to be twice as effective as those that aren’t personalized. However, on the other hand, contextual targeting is a less individualized approach that centers on displaying ads based on the content of a particular page, rather than individual demographics. For instance, with contextual targeting visitors to a cosmetics company’s website might encounter advertisements for skincare products whereas contextual targeting could be effective however its limitation could be that the ad may blend in with similar content on the page.
behavioural vs contextual targeting
The good news is that behavioural and contextual targeting can complement each other. You can utilize behavioral targeting to enhance and personalize contextual targeting advertisements. For example, if a user has previously visited a specific cosmetics company’s website, you can display ads for that business when they are browsing a fashion or skincare site.
Challenges to the Behavioral Targeting
Behavioral targeting may initially appear straightforward, but it does encounter criticism, and these concerns have valid roots. The key points of contention include:
Privacy and Security Issues:
Approximately 81% of Americans feel they have limited control over the data collected about them. Concerns about invasion of privacy arise from the tracking of website activities by businesses. While businesses often claim the trustworthiness of data handling, some major tech giants have faced criticism for their advertising and data collection practices. However, these concerns primarily arise when companies fail to adequately protect customer data. Therefore, when utilizing behavioral targeting, it becomes crucial for businesses to handle customer data with utmost care.
Incomplete Data:
When consumers delete or disable browser/app cookies, tracking their activities becomes more of a challenge. An example of this scenario is when users continue to see ads for a product even after purchasing from a different website.
Overabundance of Advertisements:
Multiple researchers have suggested that users believe that there have been a little too much of advertisements including repetitive ads. In the attention-driven digital landscape, websites are saturated with ads, and when not executed effectively, advertorial content can overwhelm users with excessive information, potentially doing more harm than good.
Negative Impact on Brand Perception:
Many have experienced annoying ads that deter them from a product. The incorporation of behavioral targeting can sometimes make ads come across as intrusive rather than engaging.
Benefits of Behavioural Targeting
Employing behavioral targeting within digital marketing has been shown to yield superior outcomes across almost all key performance measures. Other than this, here are some benefits of behavioral marketing-
Enhanced Relevance:
Behavioral targeting is an effective method to increase relevance on a large scale. For instance, if you’re a coffee enthusiast who frequently searches for different coffee brewing methods and new coffee varieties online, behavioral targeting utilises this information to display nearby coffee shops, enticing offers on coffee brands, and more. Importantly, it enables you to focus on individual customers. So, if your friend, who shares similar demographics, prefers tea, they won’t be shown coffee-related ads.
Increased Engagement and Re-engagement:
Behavioral targeting contributes to heightened engagement in two key ways: re-engaging existing customers and fostering long-term engagement. Companies analyze users’ past interactions on their website and reconnect with those who may have disengaged by re-targeting them. For example, if a visitor previously checked your pricing page but didn’t take any action, you can use re-marketing campaigns to re-engage them, even after several weeks or months.
Improved Return on Investment (ROI):
Behavioral targeting enhances business profitability, sales, and customer retention. Personalized recommendations increase the chances of consumers exploring products or services further, as seen in the success of over-the-top (OTT) platforms. It emphasizes the importance of not wasting advertising budgets on undefined audiences. Instead, behavioral targeting promotes customer segmentation and displays ads based on specific triggers like website revisits or similar product searches. This approach often leads to higher conversion rates, capitalizing on the idea that customers who previously lost interest may revisit and provide an opportunity for a sale.
Personalized Advertising:
Behavioral marketing enables tailored and personalized advertising based on users’ online activities. This enhances the customer experience and boosts a company’s sales. However, it’s crucial to exercise caution to avoid making ads appear intrusive and potentially invasive of users’ privacy, as this can negatively impact sales. For example, an ad that references a user’s wedding plans might come across as excessively personalized, leading the customer to feel that their information is being collected without consent.
Building Trust Through Retargeting:
This strategy involves repeatedly showcasing targeted advertisements across various websites, aligning with the Rule of Seven marketing principle. According to this principle, prospective customers typically need to encounter a product ad 6- 8 times before making a purchase decision. This repeated exposure builds familiarity, and
familiarity, in turn, fosters trust, ultimately driving conversions.
Final Thoughts
Therefore, Behavioral targeting is a marketing strategy that leverages data on individuals’ internet usage to enhance the effectiveness of advertising campaigns. Using behavioural marketing eliminates the need for presumption in advertisers’ strategies leading to a boost in the rates of conversion. However, it is not just about displaying targeted ads, the key lies in engaging consumers effectively with the right messaging based on their data.
Thus, brands are gradually embracing a customer-focused approach to their marketing strategies transitioning contextual advertising more focused on user behavior. Furthermore, it is recommended to build a nurturing and retention strategy to maximise the impact of your behavioral targeting efforts in an advertising plan.
