How to use behavioral marketing in your small business

As I wrote about recently, customer experience is now critical to every business, big or small. If you don’t provide an extraordinary experience from the first day of a project to the last, your clients will likely go elsewhere. On the flip side, if you do, your business will grow by leaps and bounds.

And that’s where behavioral marketing comes in. By using it, you can really elevate that customer experience. I ran across a white paper on the subject from SilverPop, and though it’s geared towards large companies, much of the advice is apropos for small businesses, too.

Here’s how to use behavioral marketing in your small business:

What is behavioral marketing?

Tracking online behavior so you can trigger interactions with an individual.

Why bother using it?

It’s proven to increase sales and generally improve the customer experience.

This sounds pretty intimidating. Where do I even start?

It might sound intimidating at first, but this blog post is going to break it down for you so it’s not.

Analyze where you are

First, you want to look at the level of personalization you are delivering on each marketing channel – website, email, social media, etc. – and the success of that personalization. (I’d use a 1 to 5 scale, with 1 equal to nonexistent and 5 equal to nearly perfect.) Now you know where there’s room for improvement, but in this blog post, we’re going to focus on websites.

Track website behavior

Now it’s time to start paying attention to what people are doing on your website. Your goal here is to link behaviors to actions. Talk to your Web developer about installing JavaScript tracking code. If you use marketing automation software, you can link it to the tracking code. Alternatively, simply pay attention to your Google analytics.

Start making changes – one at a time

Now that you are tracking behavior, you will see patterns – where people get stuck and drop off, where they take action, etc. At this point, I would work with a digital marketing strategist, who can design a specific plan of action based on what you’re finding.

If your budget doesn’t allow for that, implement one change at a time to ensure you don’t get overwhelmed. For example, perhaps after someone downloads an ebook, you can send them a personalized email with links to a case study or blog posts on that subject.

Or, if someone lingers on a page for a while, a live chat icon could appear. If someone’s reading their second blog post of yours in a row, maybe they could see a pop-up box asking if they want to subscribe to your newsletter to get more great information on the subject.

There are lots of small but effective ways to use behavioral marketing! And it’s not that complicated, is it?

What does your small business do to deliver a personalized experience?

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