This is a data-driven marketing era. Contemporary brands want to provoke emotions, measure them,  manage them. Blind, creative marketing campaigns aimed at attracting customers’ attention are gone. 

Today, brands use dozens of data collection, processing and measuring tools enabling them to better understand their target audience. Biometrics is one of them. 

Behavioral and biometric data helps to omit the use of self-reported data presented by consumers during tests. It enables to get away from the selective memory, substitution of facts, as well as other ways of concealing information usually used by users. It helps to capture their raw reactions and feelings which they can’t control or hide. 

Such data is able to help increase marketing efficiency. Let’s take a closer look at how biometrics helps to shape the future of marketing and...its present. Some of the ways could seem too fantastic for today...or no?:) 

1. Helps to create viral content 

Collection of data during the biometrics-based marketing research helps to understand how users react to external stimuli – visual, verbal, acoustic, etc. It allows identifying their emotions without asking them what they feel. It means that the analysis of biometric data represents enormous opportunities for the creation of viral content since it helps to better understand customers’ behavioral patterns and preferences. 

2. Contributes to more precise targeting of customers 

The more you know about your customers, the better you can respond to their needs. Collecting information about their instant emotional reactions can provide you with a better understanding of what they need. Furthermore, you can adjust your offerings depending on their most common emotional states. Imagine being able to identify an emotional state of a customer, which provokes him/her to make a purchase and being able to target them with advertising which resonates with this state.   

3. Improves customer experience 

The collection of biometric data allows improving customers' experience through its personalization. The same products and services are consumed by different people and the advertising which will encourage 25 years old web-designer to click on your CTA, won’t be even noticed by a 50 years old accountant. Tools that collect biometric data allow personalizing the experience for every particular group of customers without even asking them what they like or want to see. They just capture their instant reactions and tell what appeals to their emotions.   

4. Helps to personalize advertising 

On the one hand, biometrics is the opportunity for companies to personalize their advertising offers, while on the other hand, it helps to fence customers from floods of information that is irrelevant to them. Very soon biometrics will automatically prevent you from showing a frustrated person after a difficult day at work advertising new toothpaste with happy, smiling people. 

5. Stimulates the use of wearable devices 

Most probably, the aforementioned will be achieved through wearable devices, which will permanently collect data about your physical activity, blood pressure, heart rate, etc. All these data will be analyzed by a smart algorithm that will define your emotional state and instantly adapt the advertising and other content right after unlocking your smartphone.

6. Helps to catch the attention within seconds 

Biometric data offers you the keys to consumers’ behavioral patterns which are usually hidden. Thus, by knowing what appeals to your customers, you can easily create content that will catch their attention within a couple of seconds. It means that the return on your investments into marketing will be higher since you’ll spend less money on experiments and more on behavioral data-based marketing solutions.  

7. Enables new methods of users identification and data protection   

Quite soon users will forget about e-mails and passwords. Their web-accounts and mobile applications will identify them based on fingerprints or facial recognition. Thus, companies will have to adopt new methods of customers’ identification. This will also improve data protection and make online interactions with brands more secure. 

8. Interferes with privacy 

The key challenge in the full-fledged application of biometrics in marketing is privacy. Biometric data offers quite in-depth insights into behavioral patterns of customers and thus the line between using it to ensure better customers’ experience and manipulating customers’ behavior is very thin. It means that the application of biometric data in marketing will be most probably regulated by authorities in the nearest future. Furthermore, solutions that will enable users to limit the access of apps to their biometrics will appear. 

Biometrics already revolutionized the marketing industry and will continue to do so in the observable future. It represents a scientific level of precision outside the laboratory – a thing which was unimaginable for marketers 20 years ago. Combined with other cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence or virtual reality, biometrics will offer a completely new level of customers experience and opportunities for marketers to ensure it.