What is behavioral marketing?
Behavioral marketing is the practice of marketing to customers based on their behaviors. As marketers, we want to know where and how your customers are spending their time. We want to meet them where they are– at the right place, right time, and with the right message.
No small task, right? Maybe not for a mind reader.
How has behavioral marketing changed due to the pandemic?
During the pandemic, virtually everyone’s habits and routines have changed in some way. Overall, we are spending much more time at home in front of screens and less time commuting and engaging in social and leisure activities. One poll found that the average American’s daily screen time increased by 50% since the beginning of the pandemic. This means more of their attention is at home in the digital space.
We are also acquiring new sets of problems that need to be solved, like staying in shape when we can’t go to the gym or getting more bandwidth so multiple household members can have remote meetings while others stream video. These are all opportunities and incentives for businesses to reach their audiences with a new kind of messaging that speaks to them, but how do we know what that looks like?
How do you lay the foundation for behavioral marketing?
Effective behavioral marketing means meeting the customer in the environment they’re in first. Since the average American is exposed to between 6,000 and 10,000 ads per day, their expectations for meaningful, quality digital content have skyrocketed, especially you are trying to sell them something.
You can get to know how and where your customers are spending their time when you research their behavior. This can be done by conducting interviews, polls, and focus groups with your target audience. With the audience data you have collected, you can then build a buyer persona.
Well-built buyer personas are the foundation upon which marketers can pivot when times change as they have in 2020. If a business has conducted thorough market research and built a strong buyer persona informed by that research, they will be able to predict the buyer behavior with much more accuracy than by taking a “best guess” approach.
After a challenging year, many businesses can’t afford to take any chances with their marketing. Research and data-informed decisions are key in ensuring future customers get the right message at the right place and time. This is the “magic pill” that delights your customers and makes them want to come back again and again.
How do you make behavioral marketing work for you?
Once you have crafted a buyer persona that is backed by research, it is time to put a strategic and automated action plan into place.
Marketing automation platforms like Hubspot allow you to leverage your buyer persona further by discovering where your customers are in their buyer journey. Someone who has visited your website once will have a vastly different relationship with your business than a longtime customer who you connect with on a weekly basis.
Marketing automation platforms allow you to segment customers and leads and help you interact with them accordingly. This results in having meaningful exchanges with your customers, meeting them where they are with the right message. Automation platforms track metrics for segmentation like geolocation, visit data, transactional data, engagement level, and more.
With data-informed conversations, you can engage in marketing that will continue to speak to your customers where they are. As award-winning strategists and HubSpot Platinum partners, we leverage effective behavioral marketing for our clients every day.
If you’re ready to make behavioral marketing work for you, book a free consultation with us today.
Hot Dog Marketing helps expert service providers and tech companies build their brands at the same rate they’re growing their businesses. We have deep expertise in branding and online marketing for both business-to-business service companies and local consumer service businesses.