Saying, “I Do” to Behavioral Marketing

A perfect example of behavioral targeting comes with wedding bells. Brides to be often spend a lot of their time online on major wedding sites such as The Knot, Weddingchannel.com, and Modern Bride. They may also spend some time on other sites looking for things they will need in the future whether it is travel destination spots, new furniture, or appliances. Most brides to be will maintain regular access to these sites and that’s the perfect opportunity for marketers to enhance behavioral targeting.

Based on a bride’s online behavior, a marketer can tell whether they are in market or not, can pinpoint the main sites they spent the most time on, and therefore give the marketer additional opportunities to communicate with the bride to be.

However behavioral marketing can make a turn for the worse if publishers aren’t focusing on frequency caps and reports. These two factors are critical when employing behavioral targeting because you don’t want to target a bride with the same 5 ads, five times a day, especially when they aren’t in market for the service or product in the ad. This may turn a bride away from the site opposed to buying or spending more time there. Publishers also need to factor in message association. A bride my visit a major bridal site but not go to the wedding dress section of that site. If the bride starts to receive ads for this, it’s not corresponding with her behavior and may turn her away from the site. Lastly, once a bride gets married, she is married and shouldn’t need to receive more ads for wedding related materials. A bride may visit a web page once and not return there for months. This should tell the marketer that the bride may not be interested right now, or not at all, so ads shouldn’t be thrown at her.

It’s smart for publishers to keep a behavioral profile of customers so it shows their buying process or search process. Most engagements for brides follow a 14-month engagement process so publishers should fragment groups and offer those fragments to advertisers for behavioral targeting. Then any new updates and behavior patterns can be added to these fragments. Therefore, behavioral marketing should be analyzed based upon the customer’s actions.