Advanced Marketing Analytics – Part 2: Behaviors Today, Behaviors Tomorrow

In the first post of this eight-part marketing analytics series, I discussed the importance of multichannel analytics in creating a more comprehensive view of customers.  In the next few posts, we’ll dig into the different types of insights you can develop from multichannel marketing analytics and their benefit to marketers.

Behavioral Analytics – The Foundation

Behavioral analytics looks at patterns of consumer behavior (defined for the purposes of this article as either customers and prospects) and how those patterns can impact future behaviors. 

Put simply, how consumers interact with today has a lot to say about how they will engage tomorrow. What interactions am I referring to? Interactions are events such as user gestures in a mobile application, participation in one more experiences at a convention, how far a consumer progresses through a video online, or which case study or brochure a customer downloads.

When marketers layer these data points together, it can shed significant light on an individuals’ preferences and interests—a key factor in determining future behavior, creating more accurate segmentation and driving better campaign results.

Unfortunately, the broad adoption of web analytics packages like Google Analytics has led many marketers to believe that behavioral analytics are solely web-based—tracking anonymous click-throughs, page exits and aggregate goals as the measures of success. Sure, these web-based tools have their place—even we use Google Analytics for some data analysis. But the real power of behavioral analytics comes when you measure the behavior patterns of individual named consumers across multiple channels—web, mobile, kiosks, games and others—to build a 360-degree view of your customers and prospects.

Example: Behavioral Analytics in Pharma and Medical Device Marketing

With the accelerating adoption of digital and mobile within the pharmaceuticals and medical device industries, many marketers are looking toward analytics to optimize their marketing ROI and selling strategies.

Here’s an example:

A pharmaceutical company invites physicians to a convention to learn about current products and compounds in their pipeline. They re-badge each visitor as they enter the exhibit.  As physicians engage with various interactive experiences and kiosks, their interactions with content are recorded—gestures on touch screens, scores from educational games, how much time is spent with current and pipeline data, literature fulfillment requests, etc.

By combining the interactions of each physician across exhibits, marketers build a much better understanding of the type of visit that can help salespeople add more value. Now they can move from simply a “trade show lead” to providing strategic recommendations about how the salesperson can engage most effectively.

Prior to the sales call, the rep personalizes his or her iPad content to match the preferences and interests identified during the convention. As the salesperson shares content with the physician, gestures, content and the time spent with individual pieces of content is measured. These additional insights help marketing refine the message, offer and education materials to increase revenue with this physician and increase their loyalty to the brand.

Better yet, by applying some statistics, marketers can determine which sales behavior and/or marketing content are correlated to the highest revenue contribution. This means being able to eliminate what doesn’t work and double-down on what really moves the revenue needle.

More advanced multichannel analytics solutions integrate directly with existing CRM platforms to ensure that these insights are usable across the sales organizations. They also provide multiple reporting and dashboard options for executive management to visualize high-level trends and key behaviors of their target market.

In the next post in the series, we’ll talk about attitudinal insights and it’s the  benefits to marketers.

Think about your own business, customers and prospects. How much behavioral data could you be capturing and optimizing for? How might behavioral analytics improve your marketing returns? Leave your comments below—I’d love to hear from you.