Behavioral marketing is something you hear about more and more often nowadays. But can you exactly tell what it is? 

Generally speaking, behavioral marketing is the science about customers’ purchasing behavior that uses all available sources of data (majorly digital ones) to understand what customers want and how to better meet their needs. Insights provided by behavioral marketing are primarily aimed at the increase of sales by transforming people interested in your product or service into actual paying customers. 

If to put it simply: behavioral marketing facilitates the conversion of leads into sales. It’s a very effective tool that provides a comprehensive picture of your customers, as well as helps to find the approach to different target groups. 

Let’s dive into the principles of behavioral marketing and figure out how you can use it to maximize the effectiveness of your marketing communications. 

Types of behavioral marketing 

Depending on the toolkit marketers apply, there are four basic types of behavioral marketing: demographic targeting, retargeting/remarketing, behavioral-based e-mail marketing, upsells and cross-sells. 

Demographic targeting 

Demographic targeting is the classic behavioral marketing approach when you segment customers by their demographic features (gender, age, location, education level, etc.) and based on this division try to figure out how different groups perceive and interact with your product or service. Today, the most robust toolkit within this approach is offered by Google AdWords, which allows you to capture not only basic demographic features of your target audience but go deeper into demographic layers and segment them by their marriage, parental or employment status, etc. 

Retargeting/remarketing 

This approach is based on the collection of information about the customer’s previous interaction with the company’s website, advertising, and other digital marketing materials. It analysis the actions performed on the company’s website and based on this sends relevant content and offers to customers. This approach is especially effective for e-commerce companies and helps them increase the loyalty of customers by providing them with tailored solutions and offers. Retargeting makes customers feel unique since they receive personalized offers. 

Behavioral-based e-mail marketing 

A lot of companies, especially if we are talking about big brands, track your activity while you navigate their website. If you were looking through some goods but didn’t make a purchase, some companies will send you a reminding email just within a couple of hours inviting you to continue your navigation and proposing to you some very attractive offers for products or services you were researching. Despite how redundant email marketing may seem in the contemporary world of digital marketing, it works very well as a sales driver. 

Upsells and cross-sells 

As you can understand from the name of the approach, it foresees suggestions to a customer of a similar or allied product. These suggestions are based on the types of products a customer previously bought or researched on the website. Suggestions might also pop-up if a customer is identified as such falling within a certain category of customers who might like such types of products because of their “A, B, C characteristics”. 

Behavioral marketing and neuromarketing: how they connect? 

Neuromarketing offers numerous tools which can improve the efficiency of behavioral marketing. Such neuromarketing tools as eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, emotions measurement, EEG enabled the transition of behavioral marketing to an ultimately new level. They gave marketers a precious opportunity to verify what customers say with what they really think not by asking them, but by registering the activity of their brains which they can’t consciously control.

In such a way, neuromarketing enabled marketers to penetrate the unconscious part of customers' brains – a kind of Area 51 for marketers before the appearance of neuromarketing tools. As a result, neuromarketing helps to influence customers’ purchase decisions as effectively as never before.

The whole bunch of neuromarketing tools such as implicit tests, AB tests, eye-tracking paired with google analytics, data from e-mail marketing and surveys allow us to precisely define the real attitude of customers to company’s marketing materials, products and brands. 

Cutting edge digital marketing trends

The development of behavioral marketing, as well as tools used within this marketing approach, will definitely define the future of digital marketing along with other trends, among which the most promising are:  

Artificial intelligence

Our brains are unable to analyze tons of information that the digital footprint of contemporary consumers contains. Due to this marketers more and more often refer to smart algorithms which allow to capture, and quickly analyze the important data about consumers’ behavior. You can be sure that artificial intelligence will dominate the world very soon, at least the marketing one (The Next 10 Years: FROM Artificial Intelligence TO Insights Intelligence). 

Chatbots

The application of chatbots is part of a larger digital marketing trend – automation of everything. Chatbots allow to automate communication with customers and give them the possibility to interact with the company 24/7 through instant messaging. Already today around 1,4 billion people are interacting with chatbots and this number is growing very fast. Companies are also keen to use this tool since it allows them to substantially cut staffing expenses. 

Video content

Contemporary consumers don’t have time to read, that’s why they prefer to watch. And the shorter, more informative and emotionally appealing the content is the better (more about current video marketing trends). 

Influencer marketing

The emergence of social networks enabled the appearance of a new type of authority – opinion leaders. They are popular Instagram, YouTube, Facebook bloggers who generate native content which attracts thousands or even millions of followers who support their ideas or share their lifestyle. It’s a truly powerful marketing tool since by involving one opinion leader/influencer in cooperation with your brand, your content becomes exposed to hundreds of thousands of their subscribers.  

Сontemporary marketing is going in the direction of content personalization since the interests and preferences of customers differ. And to grasp all those differences, you need new approaches and tools which are offered by neuromarketing and behavioral marketing.

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