You can’t be limiting your marketing strategies to one or two channels today, not with digital media on board. If the difficulty of marketing to potential customers on this labyrinthine playing field tweaks your pain threshold, then you need to focus on behavioral targeting.

It is nothing new. Marketers have used behavioral targeting since analog times to get better ROI. But not necessarily in the digital age. Only 24% of digital marketers actively utilize behavioral targeting techniques, no matter how straight forward those techniques might be.

So let’s look at some ways to implement behavioral targeting in the digital world. In its simplest form, behavioral targeting means gathering information from a user’s browsing history then using it to tailor a marketing strategy. Consumers leave behind a digital footprint when they visit a website. Customer profiles can be created from page visits, time spent, links visited, search history, etc., and can then be used to deploy behavioral targeting, like pushing highly relevant (“targeted”) advertising. Statistics demonstrate that the chances are high that a targeted advertisement will convert a user into a customer.

When Amazon seems to follow you to any website you visit and then throws up highly relevant ads, that’s behavioral targeting used by an online ecommerce behemoth. The days of one size fits all are long gone. The Internet of the future will be an even more personalized affair. Behavioral targeting might be costly to deploy but the returns more than compensate.

The Right Approach

It is an interconnected world all the way around and the idea of remaining incognito while on the Internet is, well, quaint. Digital marketers can turn this quality to their advantage. With each passing day the prices of ads rise and the cost of customer acquisition follows suit. This has given rise to technology firms masquerading as ad networks that partner with tens of hundreds of websites simply to obtain information on user behavior. In other words, a whole new digital industry. These ad networks use sophisticated software tools and advanced analytics to slice and dice the raw data they gather and produce readily deployable digital marketing information..

It is not how much information you have but what you do with that information that matters. You can target your users via “cookies”, small bits of code deposited on your users’ hard drive. From this their browsing behavior can be tracked, the websites they visit, their social networking interests. If they send a tweet or publish a post on Facebook, you can keep a tab on it, too. All this information pertaining to your users can then be organized, aggregated and distributed so you can make sense of it and target them with ads that, hopefully, make sense to them. When someone shops on an ecommerce site their shopping behavior reveals itself, in detail. And so user personas are built and targeted ads are delivered. But here’s the trick for digital marketers: whenever they tracking users, they should make sure the users have a knowledge of it. In other words, the users have to buy in. Otherwise, it’s spying. It’s invading privacy.

If done the right way your users won’t complain about behavioral targeting. It can be a win-win situation, but not if it  becomes intrusive, a perceived breach of trust. That’s when it becomes an issue with your users. You simply cannot intrude on your users’ privacy. Everybody appreciates their needs being met, actions being anticipated before they are manifested. But no one likes their privacy hacked by advertisers. The opportunity you have is to build trust. Then you not only convert a customer, you retain a customer for life.

What do you think of behavioral targeting and its vast benefits? Contact us to deliver personalized advertising to your target group now!