One of the greatest benefits of social media-based online market research is the ability to utilise behavioural targeting.
Nowadays, the web is all about data, but the art of marketing lies in interpreting this data correctly. Unfortunately, 99.5% of the data never gets used or analysed. Visualising this data is important for businesses to have a deeper insight into consumer behaviour and browsing patterns. When integrated into business systems, these timely actionable insights and events are likely to act as critical success factors.
Benefits of Behavioural Targeting Over Profiling Questions
It is easier to make your marketing more effective if you have more specific information about user behaviour at your disposal. Moreover, user expectations are increasing. Audiences get annoyed when they see less personalised or more irrelevant content. With behavioural targeting, you can set the bar high by sending the right content to the right audience at exactly the right time. According to McKinsey analysis, personalisation can deliver five to eight times the ROI on marketing spends and lift sales 10% or more.
But, sometimes, the procedural flaws of data collection makes marketers fall short of achieving their marketing goal. Hence, an intelligence-driven targeting is the need of the hour to enhance the quality of user data. In a world where nearly 50% of the consumers feel they receive too many marketing emails, personalised campaigns make a huge difference.
Thus, the advantages of using behavioural targeting are much more tangible than profiling questions. In behavioural targeting, data management platforms track consumer metrics to build a knowledge bank about where and why their users visit online. Some of them include:
- Frequently visited page
- Actions like subscriptions and purchase
- The time they visited a page
- The duration they spent on a page
- Links and ads click
While profiling questions are still useful in a specific context, the benefits of this quality of data are extensive.
What Exactly Is Behavioural Targeting?
Behavioural targeting is the science of using data to establish the profiles of users based on their web-browsing behaviour to display highly relevant ads and personalised marketing messages.
In other words, behavioural marketing gathers data from website activity, purchase activity, and third-party applications to understand the target audience in a deeply strategic and relevant manner.
Browsing behaviour comprises every action taken online by any given user. Reader’s movements are tracked by every website you visit, every product you search, every link you click or every bit of content you interact with at any point in time. This user data is the goldmine for a broader marketing game, such that when used wisely, it has the potential to achieve great results.
How Does Behavioural Targeting Work?
Behavioural targeting works by using user data to establish the profile of a specific user or various segments of online users to create a more personalised experience for them. In other words, you take the information for your users to build a more realistic profile of them which helps you tailor your messaging overall.
When personalised content is sent at the right time, the likelihood of the audience taking action increases. It also creates an interesting and engaging experience for the visitor and thus, it’s success rates are higher than generic opinions.
Once you know your audience, you can give them content they really want to open and read. But how do you do this? Here’s how:
- Collect Consumer Data in Creative Ways
This is the first step in the behavioural targeting process. An efficient online research platform collects data in unique ways to provide valuable insights. This creative expertise ensures user cooperation through engaging surveys and activities.
Working with a platform that specialises in this field is key to understand consumer expectation and personality. Here, the main advantage of an interactive medium like the internet in enhancing user experience is the real-time feedback from the consumers.
The following data points can be collected to establish the online profile of a consumer:
- Location data
- Data entries in forms and surveys
- Session behaviour (page views, navigation clicks, content he/she reads)
- Browsing history
- Purchase history
- Devices they use
- Develop User Persona to Invite the Right Participants
The type of respondents researchers sought are totally different than those people who take part in focus groups or surveys for money. Online research needs respondents who are interested in contributing and being heard, and who want to make a difference. The way to ensure that you get the right respondents is to send specific and targeted invitations.
Therefore, it is important to understand the various personalities that make up your target audience. Understanding user personas helps you figure out what they really need or care about so that you can communicate with them in the most relevant way.
A user persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona embodies all the characteristics of your ideal potential customer. User personas entail demographic details, interests, and behaviour traits. These personas help you see your potential customers as real persons, such that you no longer have to guess who they are and what they really want.
- Ensure Proactive Engagement by Using the Right Dialogue and Efficient Technology
Efficient technology is paramount from the perspective of a researcher as well as a respondent. If a user finds a platform difficult, they simply stop using it. Hence, it is important to prefer a platform that takes aesthetics into consideration and has an intuitive user interface.
Although technology is crucial in determining which platform is great to use, it is yet more important to achieve proactive engagement. To achieve this, engagement managers interact and engage with the participants and motivate them to come forth with new ideas and opinions. This task requires a clear set of goals in terms of how often to interact with the participants and what dialogues to use, depending upon the type of data required.
Making the Switch to Bolt
In market research, a competitive edge lies in connecting with the customer at the right time to enhance the quality of your research data with rich and significant answers.
However, analysing behavioural data can be an overwhelming task and experience. Multiple campaigns and varied audiences makes it difficult to interpret patterns without considering numerous variables. A good research needs the agility to make changes to keep you informed of the needs of your target audience. This flexibility in turn allows you to cover a broad array of research topics – whether that is a fast-turnaround survey or topline summary data for a detailed report.
If you wish to stay one step ahead of the market with key success factors like strong engagement, well-recruited participants, and flexible research, you would need the backing of an automated and smart market research platform like the one we offer at Bolt. Using our agile research platform, you can keep your mind focused on the questions you are looking to be answered to take your research data quality to another level and seamlessly carry out great projects.
