You’re ready to build your first behavioral-targeted audience, but what criteria should you use for behavioral segmentation? Here are 11 ways to leverage your data to find the perfect target audience.
1. Website Visits
Gauge how often a user is visiting your site and target based on frequency. For example, run a reactivation campaign to those who’ve been absent for a certain amount of time.
2. Page-Specific Visits
Gauge visits to product pages, or content pages that contain specific types of content. This can help you establish topic-based interest. For example, visitors engaging with a blog about kidney disease are potential targets for a campaign that provides a kidney disease whitepaper, algorithm, and subsequent product offer.
3. Duration of Website Engagement
Use the time a visitor spends on your site, or on a particular page, to gauge their level of interest.
4. Website Recency
Leverage recency data (when a visitor last came to your site) to target those engaging with your content. Set up automated campaigns to interact with recent visitors to your website. And when we say recent, we mean those who just left. Data shows that instant action with leads who are still actively searching ends in higher sales. Even a 5-minute lag time between their interest and your response may be too long.
5. Type of Website Content
Identify the types of content users like. Do they engage with articles, webinars, CE, blogs, infographics? Once you know, you’ll be able to target them more directly based on their preferences.
6. Ecommerce Indicators
Keep track of abandoned carts and purchase behaviors. Targeting these areas can lead to reengagement with forgotten shopping carts and possibly reactivate a sale.
7. Purchase Rates
Assess purchase data and rank each customer as a high, medium, or low-volume user of your product. This is particularly important for consumable products.
8. Type of Purchase
Look at what your customers are buying. If a customer has a history of exclusively purchasing feline-specific products, it’s likely they’re a cat-only practitioner and now can be targeted more directly with the appropriate messaging.
9. Email Behavior
Evaluate email open and click behavior. This can be focused on the topic of the content or the type of content such as articles, webinars, infographics, or podcasts.
10. Campaign Engagement
Segment an audience based on historic campaign engagement to reactivate them for a synergistic or similar campaign.
11. Buyer Journey Stage
Support the buyer’s progression down your sales funnel by providing the right information at the right time. For example, a top of funnel lead won’t be ready for an in-depth sales message. Leverage this data to make sure your campaigns aren’t tone deaf. Learn more about customer journeys in this recent blog post.
Layering in Demographic Data
Once you’ve established your criteria for behavioral segmentation, consider layering in demographic data to add further structure to your target audience. This can include geography, number of doctors at the practice, job title, or even specialty.
When behavioral and demographic data come together, they can reveal a very clear picture of your target persona. For example, without behavioral and demographic data, it would be easy to target a pain management solution to general practitioners that would likely pick up some leads, but there are sacrifices. The messaging had to be generic to appeal to a broader audience, and on the back end, the sales organization would be challenged to adapt the messaging to a complex audience with various subsets of requirements.
With data on your side, instead of a generic message to general practitioners, you can get into the nitty gritty of your audience and focus on an extremely specific target, like feline-only practitioners in the northeast focused on feline OA and DJD pain brought on by cold winter months.