The Trendy Concept of Behavioral Marketing

It won’t be a misnomer to say that the advent of internet has completely changed the business scene around the world. No longer are physical and geographical barriers a hindrance for communicating in a fast and reliable manner. These days, after the advent of the internet, it has almost become imperative for companies to concentrate on online marketing. The internet has become one of the most important media for advertising. A major chunk of a company’s revenue can be generated through online marketing and advertising. This is where behavioral marketing steps in with its proven capabilities.

There is intense competition prevailing over the internet, with thousands of companies trying to woo consumers to buy several thousands of products and services. This being the case, it is not necessary that a consumer goes through your particular website or online advertisement. With behavioral marketing though, you can target specific consumers, who could drive your business growth.

In today’s competitive business scenario behavioral marketing makes sense for both advertisers and marketers alike since they can target specific core groups, instead of frittering away money and energy without any focus. This in turn converts to tremendous savings of both efforts and money for advertisers and marketers. Importantly apart from saving significant amounts of money on other forms of advertisements, behavioral marketing also results in increased profits.

The entire concept of behavioral marketing focuses on targeting the consumers online behavior, rather than go by the page contents that they view. Advertisers and marketers collect data from various sources including click stream data and IP details in order to ascertain the internet behavior of their target customers. Once any targeted internet user visits a particular web page of interest to him or her, they are then targeted though advertisements that is specially created using a ‘run-of-site’ or ROS placement.

In today’s extremely competitive business environment, it is extremely difficult to understand consumer behavior. Behavioral marketing solves this problem to a very large extent. With this type of marketing, advertisers can make their campaigns much more effective and targeted. One of the biggest advantages of behavioral marketing is that you get can get in front of your target consumer, right at the moment, when he or she is about to make a purchase decision. An increasing number of companies are realizing the importance of behavioral marketing and resorting to taking steps to implement as part of their marketing strategy.

The whole process involves collecting data based on the internet usage of various consumers through the use of different types of technologies. The audience is targeted based on several factors including, surrounding content on the pages they visited, geography and demography. Such detailed targeting of consumers is known to yield great results and there are many companies which would vouch for the efficacy of this behavioral marketing.

Behavioral marketing basically focuses on four different categories of consumers. They are as follows:

• Ethical consumers: These shoppers tend to avoid online sources which are considered unethical.
• Economic consumers: They form a vast majority of the consumers and are always on the look out for product prices, quality and other value additions.
• Apathetic consumers: These are the consumers who shop the least and do so only when they are badly in need of a product or service.
• Personalized consumers: These are perhaps the most interactive of all types of consumers. They intend to regularly interact with the customer service staff of online stores, whenever they shop.

Once such a data is scientifically collected, the advertisements are then carefully created keeping in mind the target audience from these four categories. While these are the four categories using which consumers can be divided, behavioral marketing in itself can be divided into three types.

1. Based on the consumer’s visit to a particular webpage: In this type detailed data is collected based on the consumer’s visit to particular web pages. This way marketer can get more than a fair idea about the shopping patterns of such consumers. For instance a person who visits fashion websites often would automatically tend to shop for fashion clothing or accessories. Marketers can use this to target relevant advertisements to such consumers.
2. Based on the content read or on the keyword used for search: This is yet another way in which marketers gather data about consumer behavior. Behavioral segments are formed using the different keywords that consumers use. These keywords are then thoroughly analyzed in order to create specific advertisements.
3. Based on the past record of visitors to your particular website: This is another way to formulate a behavioral marketing strategy. This is done by keeping a record of all the visitors to your website. You can then direct advertisements at these past visitors which would make them act as referrals and therefore increase your business in turn.

There are certain other dimensions that are there to behavioral marketing that are being gradually introduced these days. For instance marketers are increasingly paying attention towards customer retention using behavioral marketing. In fact customer retention becomes that much easier with all the data that is collected about consumers. Marketers can always grasp their customer’s interests and needs in a better manner in this type of marketing.

Building a brand with behavioral marketing is another aspect that is being seriously looked into by marketers these days. In fact many of the leading brands are already in the process of leveraging the benefits that behavioral marketing offers. The entire concept of branding has been revolutionized with the coming in of behavioral marketing as a concept. This concept helps in conditioning the perception about a particular brand in a consumer’s mind, thereby increasing recall and awareness over a period of time. With all these advantages it is no wonder that behavioral marketing is fast becoming the preferred choice of marketers and advertisers alike, around the world.