How to Use Behavioral Marketing to Build a Relationship With Your Customers

Behavioral marketing can be used in conjunction with content marketing to improve and enhance the customer relationship. Modern businesses store a significant amount of data, but they don’t always use this information to their benefit. Applying data to communications can ensure companies tailor their marketing campaigns for optimal effectiveness.

How web behavior can positively impact the customer relationship

Behavioral marketing involves the capture and application of web behaviors with the end goal of creating relevancy. Users are yearning for relevancy, and brands that meet these expectations have a higher chance of deepening the customer relationship. Web behaviors are often considered to be a better customer marketing technique than basic demographic information. Behavior reflects what users are actually doing, synonymous with the old adage “Actions speak louder than words.”

Web behavior can capture every action the customer takes once on a website. The focus should be on web pages and blog articles visited and content downloaded. Essentially, this can be considered the history of the user’s relationship with a brand or company. The behavior can reveal their interests, questions and potential paths to purchase.

Improving and optimizing through user behavior

Behavioral data can be used to inform content and digital marketing strategies on an aggregate level as well as influence the strategy on an individual level. On an aggregate level, behavioral data can be used to understand what content users find most relevant as well as terminology and wording that generate engagement and action.

The most common use for user behavior analytics is to improve the overall function of a site and provide the high-level direction for a digital marketing effort or content marketing campaign. Companies often collect large amounts of data regarding user visits, engagement and conversions. Businesses can then mine this information for the content that is proving to be most useful and persuasive to its audience. Once this data has been analyzed, changes can be made to content and form to achieve greater customer engagement.

Demographic information is useful for the initial development of company content and user experience, but it often fails in actually predicting user behavior to a particular site or content campaign. Instead, demographic information can be used as a jumping-off point, before more sophisticated user behavior statistics come into play. Demographics can contribute to messaging, but user behavior will ultimately tell a business whether its content marketing strategy and customer relationship management campaign are successful.

An example would be eye-tracking studies by KISSMetrics, which were used to reveal the content that draws the most users. The user behaviors related to how the users consumed the data that was presented. Through the revealed data, companies could then improve their content for better user engagement and content value.

Modifications to a site’s content can range from simply repackaging content around topics and wording that resonate the strongest with users to rethinking how a website’s navigation aligns to the path to purchase. Regardless, the goal is to leverage users’ aggregate behavior to identify needs that the company can better meet.

Making the customer experience more meaningful

Breaking through the email clutter is becoming more and more difficult for marketers. Applying web behavior to email marketing programs, for example, can help companies create the exact relevancy that users are yearning for today.

Once users engage with content on a website, such as a downloadable ebook or how-to guide, marketers can use this information as an indicator for certain interests. Following up with tailored emails based on what content was downloaded or pages were visited can help marketers deliver enhanced relevancy. Marketing automation makes this type of tailoring possible and efficient for marketers of any business size. Communicating with customers specifically and in a relevant manner can help build relationships. Users want increased relevancy, and demonstrating that your company “knows” your customers is a critical building block in creating long-term relationships.

Leveraging behavioral marketing on lean budgets

Marketing automation investments to enable this type of systematic communication doesn’t always require six-figure investments. A significant amount of web behavior and data are often able to capture leads with less investment in infrastructure, married with analytical competency. Behavioral marketing can be an extremely cost-effective way to build relationships and leverage lean budgets.

Behavioral marketing also has the advantage of being either as simple or as complex as a company desires. Companies can use behavioral marketing to draw very simple conclusions and make very minor changes to their content and site format – or they can use more complex data mining and behavioral prediction techniques to draw more advanced conclusions or to create a truly holistic, cross-platform user experience and relationship management campaign. Thus, a behavioral marketing campaign grows organically within the budget of the company.

To find out how your company can leverage behavioral marketing, contact J&C. With 37 years of experience in the industry, J&C's award-winning team is made up of experts in the art and science of customer engagement.