BEHAVIORAL TARGETING
Paving the Way to Integrated Marketing
The industry is abuzz with a plethora of columns on the pros and cons of behavioral targeting. A recent E-consultancy editorial
questions the relevance of using broad consumer demographics for online
marketing. The author suggests focusing instead on behavioral targeting
for delivering the right marketing message. Without a doubt, behavioral
targeting can tremendously improve the relevance of online messaging,
but it doesn't discount the merits of other marketing tools, such as
demographics analysis. If anything, currently missing from the online
marketing game is the use of more traditional methods of understanding
consumer behaviors to complement online strategies, and vice versa.
The Need to Go Beyond
Today, the Internet plays a substantial, if not crucial, role in
most people's everyday living. As a result, there should be less
separation between the different media and the creation of a consumer
journey that combines knowledge of customers' on and off-line actions.
After all, any behavioral information is useful in understanding a
purchase path.
It's equally important to know which sites were clicked on and what
this user typically does at 3 p.m. every day. Digital marketing has
been moving past the good ol' reliable reach and frequency model toward
other metrics, such as messaging relevance, timeliness, proximity to
purchase, and engagement. These are all data sets that non-digital
marketers try to capture and evaluate with great detail and analytic
finesse. It seems only appropriate to combine non-digitally obtained
information to complement the digital mix.
Direct mail targeting provides non-digital
marketers with a standard set of demographic traits, along with
lifestyle characteristics, social preferences, and life-stage groups.
Comprehensive background like this affords insights on consumer
behaviors that can then be used to predict online behaviors. In this
case, physical location can be translated into geo-locations that help
indicate products consumers are most likely to purchase, in a specific
region.
Whereas online marketers can benefit from non-digital observations
and action tracking, the reverse holds true for marketing that lies
outside the Internet realm. The digital channel is turning into touch
points for critical steps in the sales process. Thus, behavioral
targeting not only captures consumers' actions online but also helps
traditional marketers understand market conditions almost in real time.
Whereas focus groups may take weeks to conduct and interpret results,
tactics like clickstream analysis can capture online behaviors much
faster and provide insight to consumers' specific areas of interest.
The best part is online evaluation metrics will only continue to
improve and provide marketers with a more precise understanding of
purchase intent overall.
Time to Integrate
In this constantly evolving marketing game, integration is key. It's
all about looking at a marketing issue comprehensively and holistically
and approaching it from multiple angles. After all, people don't live
in silos: there's no separation between their on- and off-line lives.
Marketers must recognize this lack of differentiation and merge data
across media to fully optimize messaging efforts and efficiency.
Industry experts expect behavioral targeting to take center stage this
year and become the big trend for 2008. Their predictions are
definitely appropriate, as behavioral targeting's benefits run far and
wide: increasing site optimization, delivering a higher degree of ad
relevance, improving user experiences online, and so on. Linking more
traditional means of understanding consumer behavior (such as in-person
surveys and demographics analysis) with behavioral targeting will
create optimal consolidated consumer journeys and pave the way for the
most consumer-centric strategies yet.
View the original ClickZ article.