Advertising to your audience
Behavior advertising is what smart advertisers are using to target specific audiences. Behavior targeting advertising is a fantastic tool for business in reaching their target audience through utilizing their ‘digital footprint’. It works using information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior such as sites they have visited or the searches they have made, to select which advertisements to display to that particular individual. This helps businesses deliver their online advertisements to the users who are most likely to be influenced by them. And it helps your customers gain information personalised to their interests by analysing their actions online and only showing them related content or ads.
So how can you make this form of advertising work for your business?
The key is, knowing your customer. This form of advertising works so well because it is based on ‘actual’ rather than ‘predicted’ behaviour. Traditional methods of segmenting audiences are proving less effective. Defining consumers by traditional demographics is not as effective as grouping them by behaviour. Where they go and what they do online is a far better indicator of who they are.
Identifying people by their interests makes for more effective advertising. It enables marketers to reach the highest possible concentration of their target market when they are the most receptive to the message. It gives them the ability to deliver ‘timely’ messaging, based on the sites a user has visited or the actions they’ve performed during their visits. This qualification process through, observing customers online actions, reduces campaign wastage. You can avoid showing an existing customer an ad encouraging them to sign up for a service they already have and instead, focus on cross- or up-sell. This is not only good business but builds all important customer relationships by sending relevant messages and garnering higher response rates.
Joel Crawford from online ad technology firm Eyeblaster uses this example of a user who browses the Virgin website to top up his mobile account. “When this user surfs the Internet, using behavioral targeting, he may be served an ad about another Virgin product, but not one for mobile phones as we know he already has one.”
How can you get behaviour targeting working for your businesses online presence?
Claria and Behaviour Link offer behaviour tools that rely on users
downloading an application, which shows them ads based on their surfing
patterns. Revenue Science helps publishers collect data on users so ads
can be targeted to relevant segments. MediaBrokers’ tool, by contrast,
is advertiser-driven, as messages are adapted for prospects and
customers, depending which stage of the buying cycle they’re at.
As the popularity of blogs and social network sites such as Twitter and Facebookcontinue to rise, some experts believe behavioral advertising will come into its own. This is where a large percentage of users are spending their time and the opportunity exists for advertising to become relevant and more advantageous to consumers and less of an irritant.
