Behavioral Targeting Overview

What is behavioral targeting?

• Behavioral targeting is a form of target marketing or segmentation marketing, which breaks a market into customer segments and focuses marketing efforts on key segments (usually, a grouping of key segments) to increase marketing efficiency and effectiveness.
• Behavioral targets are defined and sized by the characteristics that are intrinsic to brand and/or offer response.
  • Target definitions can indclude demographics (such as household income, languages spoken, number of people in the household, age), behaviors (such as "watched ESPN2 in last 7 days" or "head right to clearance rack when entering store"), and pyschographics (such as general attitudes, self-concepts, media opinions, etc.)
  • For example, the key target for an upscale women's clothing store may include data points such as: "spent $1000+ on clothes in the past 6 months"; agree a lot that: "everything I buy is the highest quality", "always look for brand name", "worth paying extra for quality", "price is not most important, I get what I want", etc.

How is behavioral targeting used?

• Most companies associate behavioral targeting mainly with online marketing, and behavioral targeting became a hot buzz word or trend for online marketing in the '90s. Wikipedia defines behavioral targeting as: "a technique used by online publishers and advertisers to increase the effectiveness of their campaigns."
• handshake Marketing, however, uses behavioral targeting to reach consumer targets in all types of media ("off-line", online, digital, non-paid, etc.), addressing customers and potential customers in all media forms with which they are engaged.

Why change to behavioral targeting and marketing?

• Behavioral targeting can help you increase the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising campaigns:
  • Behavioral targets receive brand messages/offers within environments that are contextually relevant or complimentary to your core brand message.
  • Creative, copy & offer executions are based upon the measured psychographics, demographics, and interests of behavioral targets, resulting in more ad relevancy.
• Behavioral targeting helps you maximize your marketing budget and is more efficient: Behavioral targeting increases opportunity volumes to go after while lowering media waste (e.g., spend ad budget dollars only on those segments most likely to respond). You can actually increase result levels while lowering the overall cost of growth.
• Behavioral targeting has been proven to work better than traditional methods: behaviors have been case proven, time and again (see handshake's case studies section), to be more predictive of future consumer behaviors than demographics alone. Traditional demographics, in other words, are not predictive of future brand adoption, although demographics are still highly relevant and layer underneath behavioral targets to support creative and media executions.

Learn more about handshake's behavioral targeting approach, part of our Integrated suite of marketing solutions, as well as key applications we offer that will help you go after behavioral target opportunities... or contact us at 516-767-9394 to discuss solutions for your brand specifically.