Gaining behavioral insights is the art of learning how consumers act on the market and react to marketing messages. Over the last decade, this art form has shifted more towards analyzing online consumers since eCommerce has become increasingly popular. Leading marketers use the data presented to them by experts of consumer behavior studies to form brand strategies, marketing campaigns and shape their customer service processes. One detail both marketers and behavioral analysts both agree on is that when companies focus on consumers, they respond efficiently.
Hence, providing tailored experiences to consumers has now become the norm. It’s what the average consumer expects from businesses. Since behavioral analytics is now a staple for all businesses aiming to succeed in the modern-day market, how can companies gain an edge? More importantly, as businesses go global, thanks to the internet, how can marketers target millions of people efficiently?
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Why Old-School Behavioral Analytics and Marketing Techniques Don’t Work?
There are several behavior principles for impacting audience behavior. Some highly important principles of behavioral analytics are –
- Certain strategies work fine for certain demographics, while other strategies produce better results on other groups of people.
- If a target consumer doesn’t respond to a specific technique today, it’s unlikely they’ll respond to it the next day.
- Selecting one specific technique and sticking to it is more effective than chopping and changing your marketing plans mid-way by using multiple techniques.
Notice the conflict of interest in points two and three? In other words, finding the right technique for one consumer out of a population of millions is impossible if we keep using traditional marketing methods like audience profiling. Hence, it’s imperative that marketers improve their ways of targeting customers with highly personalized marketing messages. More importantly, if we want to sustain these marketing efforts, the creation of an independent and self-optimizing marketing process is crucial. How can marketers create such a system? Data – that’s the short answer!
How Data Analytics Is Transforming Marketing?
Access to large amounts of customer data is completely transforming the marketing game. Instead of simply targeting basic aspects of certain demographics and depending on guesswork for the rest, businesses can now find out precisely what their customers want and modify their marketing messages on the spot. Advances in AI and Machine learning is allowing leading behavioral insights companies to better understand the average customer and create personalized messages that they want to see.
Amazon is a great example of a company using AI-powered behavioral analytics in an efficient way. The eCommerce giant assesses user behavior to find out details like what items the customer has purchased in the past, what items the customer has viewed in the past, what products they have on their wish lists, etc. to make instant product recommendations. By optimizing and personalizing their shopping experiences, Amazon has increased its sales massively. 35% of the company’s revenue is generated by its AI-powered recommendation engine.
Can Smaller Businesses Replicate this Success?
Yes, and they’ve been exceeding at using advanced behavioral analytics for marketing for many years now. In 2015, a study revealed that agencies who used these tools to personalize their marketing messages achieved 36% higher conversion rates and 21% greater lead acceptance rates. The intelligence derived from AI, ML, and data analytics-driven tools can also be applied to social media marketing, content marketing, or even advertising on Google.
The best behavioral insights company can help a business of any size –
Create Content that Increases the Chance of Conversion
Behavioral analytics is key to discovering what content resonates with target customers. More importantly, it reveals what type of content doesn’t resonate with audiences. AI, ML, and data analytics-driven tools can instantly identify parts of purchase journeys where customer-engagement dropped off. This enhanced understanding of target customer behavior enables companies to polish the content they offer and boost their chances of securing conversions.
Target More Efficiently
AI and ML-driven behavioral analytics reveal important details about individual customers. Effectively, businesses can know –
- How much each consumer tends to spend on purchases.
- Which offers/discounts enticed them the most.
- At what point of their customer journeys they were most inclined to being converted.
- How familiar they are with the company’s products (e.g. which customer directly clicked on a product link and which customer took his time to browse around the website).
- What type of content a customer is most interested in.
These insights can help small-scale companies separate highly responsive customers from the typically un-responsive ones. Understanding and segmenting these different personality types is key to improving your marketing efforts in the long run.
Personalize Customer Journeys
Even though most consumers expect personalized experiences from businesses, AI and ML-driven behavioral analytics enables companies to further improve their personalization efforts and hopefully surprise their target customers. Relevant offers or content will make them more inclined to nurturing relationships with the company.
Modern-day behavioral insights companies improve their clients’ ability to foresee what customer will react to what marketing or persuasive technique, through which marketing channel, and at what time!