What Is Behavioral Marketing and How to Apply it to Your Digital Marketing Campaign?

As a business owner or marketer, one of the things you’re bound to be most curious about is your customer. The who, what, where, when, and how of that elusive entity probably keeps you awake at night.  Over the decades, marketing studies have more or less cracked the answers to most of these questions.  Ever since the 1900s, the classical schools of marketing thought envisioned the commodity-based approach, the functional and the institutional one.  These gradually gave rise to the concept of marketing management or control of the market.  Post World War II, with the boom in industrialization, new product launches, materials, technologies, and the opening up of new markets due to enhanced transportation facilities, the rise of a multi-disciplinary approach became popular.  Sociology, psychology, economics, geography, population studies, demographics, socio-economic classification, organizational studies, culture, anthropology, etc. were all stirred into the mix. They provided valuable insights that culminated in the rise of a new, multi-pronged approach to marketing.  Currently, in the Digital Age, business owners have access to humongous volumes of data via their websites and social media. Using the power of this treasure trove of information about customers and visitors to websites and through their actions online, marketers can gain almost unimaginable advantages. 

Behavioural Marketing: A Quick Overview

It’s possible to connect with your customer and sell products and services to them based on observing their behaviours as they interact with your brand, your ads, your website, with you directly on social media pages, emails, virtual assistants, feedback and review pages, etc.  Behavioural marketing is a method of segmenting or dividing up your market according to different behaviours displayed by certain customers at certain points in time.  Through such segmentation, you can tailor your communication with customers much better and more efficiently.  Behavioural segmentation offers the opportunity to provide personalized communication tailored to meet their unique needs, preferences, and budget based on observed behaviours.  This helps to create a strong connection. Studies show that personalization leads to stronger visitor engagement, better customer UX, enhanced perception of your brand, it ramps up the conversion rate and increases lead generation and customer acquisition.  Most importantly, it predicts future behaviour based on historical ones.  As a marketer or business owner, it gives you direct access to the individual customer. So you no longer need to create marketing campaigns of the hit or miss variety aimed at mass markets.  Your brand becomes memorable and established firmly in the minds and hearts of your customers and this opinion is shared on social media, leading to access to even greater pools of potential customers. Behavioural marketing can be seamlessly synced with your digital marketing campaign and creates a good relationship with customer.  But before we get to that, we can look at the concept of digital marketing.

What Is Digital Marketing?

If you thought digital marketing was a brand-new 21st-century idea, here’s a reality check.  In 1907, not too long after Marconi patented the radio in 1896, the American inventor, Lee de Forest transmitted the world’s first commercial advertisement over the radio, an electronic medium.  It featured an operatic selection of arias rendered by the great Enrico Caruso and Emmy Destinn from a performance currently featured at the Met in New York. The results were amazing because it led to a huge demand for show tickets. And that was the genesis of digital marketing.  Today, most people think that “digital marketing” would not exist if not for the internet. If smartphones, social media, mobile apps, Google ads, etc. weren’t around there would be no digital marketing.  True? Not by a long chalk.  In real terms, it refers to all forms of marketing that are conducted involving any electronic devices and it can be done both online and offline.  With studies that show that Americans spend more than 11 hours on electronic devices in a day, it’s important to know how it works in both cases.  Online digital marketing comprises:

• Search engine optimization and marketing
• Social media and content marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Email marketing 
• PPC (pay per click) advertising

Offline is slightly more complicated because it may mesh with certain online functions. The categories of offline marketing would include:

• Radio
• Television
• Phone
• Use of enhanced electronic features

The primary aim of any kind of marketing is to connect the seller and the buyer, in the right place, at the right time. Studies show that in 2019, people in the US spend an average of 6 hours and 42 minutes on the internet in a day. Roughly about half this time is spent on the mobile phone. So this is where your customers hang out and you need to meet them there. While this gives you a good idea about where your customers are at, you need something more to tell you what they do there.  Your next concern is to connect with them. This is where you wade into the rich and fertile field of behavioral marketing. 

Behavioural Marketing and Digital Marketing

With so much information available, it’s logical that these two streams should blend and leverage their individual powers.  With digital media undergoing dramatic changes at breakneck speed, your digital marketing strategies cannot afford to focus on just one or two channels. The name of the game today is omnichannel marketing.  Marketing gurus have observed that customers approach consumer decisions from multiple sources such as laptops, desktops, tablets, and smartphones. Your marketing message has to be conveyed across all these platforms.  Today the playing field is far from level, and it’s almost a minefield, where a single wrong move can consign you to the later pages of a search engine.  Attention spans have shrunk drastically. It takes a visitor just 0.05 seconds to evaluate whether a website appeals to them or not.  In spite of all these insights, the hard reality is that just 24% of digital marketers find the need to operationalize behavioral marketing techniques.  You can gather information from a user’s browsing history, digital footprint, IP address, heat mapping, cookies, pages visited, time spent on each, the links they use, social media impact, and more.  It’s a highly connected world. Tech firms pretending to be advertising networks develop relationships with websites to mine behavioral data, using advanced analytics and software.  The ultimate aim is to transform clicks into revenue, build your brand, enhance the UX, a sturdy brand, provide relevant and valuable education/information to your customers, predict future behaviours and forecast your own growth and expansion.  Also Read: What Is An Intelligent Digital Marketing? 10 Clever Tactics To Boost Your E-Commerce Sales