Behavioral Target Marketing

Defining the Current Marketing Challenge

Behavioral targeting marketing is a strategic approach to engaging within public social networks and online communities in order to identify and target difficult to reach buyers, enhance the customer acquisition process, build relationships with key market influencers, and/or assist in recruiting channel partners within complex sales.

Complex Sales

Traditional marketing has a fundamental challenge in the difference between “likely buyers” versus potential buyers. If we poll based on demographics, we can’t really tell who is likely to be a potential buyer.

Marketing spends a lot of money on their websites for predictive algorithms and website “cookie crumb trails” to try and predict potential buying behaviors. But the challenge in marketing is that it is an approximation of the market. Even when an organization leverages focus groups for research; the results are skewed by the medium and do not fully represent actual, unconscious buyer behavior.

The first step in a target marketing program to identify market trends, buyer segmentation, and how behavioral target marketing can affect a company’s lead generation, and customer engagement programs. The goal is to enable the organization to see how social media is evolving and impacting the core of marketing and customer engagement.

More and more, we are seeing market after market where the customer buying process has shifted towards social media. Individuals and companies are looking towards social networks, blogs, peer reviews, etc. to better identify the answer to their problems. Many times this research phase of the buying process precedes the outreach to the company or even the website. If the buying process precedes the sales process, this represents a major shift in buyer behavior. Social media has created a paradigm shift that will impact the way we do business in every aspect. Companies are trying to understand its implications and applications.

How do you manage the customer relationship, if buyers are doing research before your organization becomes engaged?

In short, focus on the buying influencers; whether market influencers or internal influencers who do the research within organizations to provide to their boss. In a complex sale, this can be the critical step in winning and losing. Your people may not even know that a potential buyer has entered the market, done their research, and then made a buying decision. What you don’t know, can’t influence, and can’t impact can be critical to your business.

How deep is the impact on our market and business, how do we respond, when do we respond, how can we use this to not only respond, but change the rules for growth?

We are also able to leverage this analysis to see the “disconnect” in the way buyers engaging with the market versus the way vendors market. In many cases, the vendors are really missing the mark —buyers are conversing over social media at a 10:1 ratio versus vendors. Additionally, the buyers may be using completely different language. Vendors are focused on the “solution stack” -– features, functionality, benefits. Buyers are focused on pain, experience, exploration, decision support, value, etc.

How do we leverage this insight to generate real business affect?

We are now able to leverage the public social networks to perform market segmentation analysis not only for marketing communications, but also execute lead generation, customer engagement, and support functions. We are also able to leverage this analysis to see the “disconnect” in the way buyers engaging with the market versus the way vendors engage within the market. In many cases, the vendors are really missing the mark —buyers are conversing over social media at a 10:1 ratio versus vendors. Additionally, the buyers may be using completely different language. Vendors are focused on the “solution stack” -– features, functionality, benefits. Buyers are focused on pain, experience, exploration, decision support, value, etc. Subtle differences could mean the difference between finding their way to your solution and missing it completely.