Digital Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Analytics, Web Design

Have you ever wondered what would it be like to know what your customer really wants? Reading his brain and watching every move to deliver what he needs at the right moment! Well Behavioral Marketing allows you to do so!

Behavioral Marketing or Targeting is a marketing method; it is a web technology which allows tracking user behavior by following his navigation pattern and interaction path. This valuable information about a user’s website visit is then used to target advertising to his needs and optimize the website services to align with user’s requirements.

“Behavioral targeting is advertising’s attempt at supplying you with specialized ads developed from your Internet history”. Tech Republic Definition

Behavioral marketing is not being effectively used in the Middle East; main reasons not effectively employing this beautiful and miraculous online marketing practice are:

1. Lack of industry practices awareness
2. Lack of online marketing techniques on marketers’ side
3. No real efforts are invested into web data analytics and analyzing behavioral metrics.
4. Lack of Behavioral Targeting technologies on the publishers side

Apparently watching the pattern of user’s behavior and registering his activities on the website can get marketers to know him better and therefore satisfy his needs and in return get yours fulfilled! So behavioral marketing actually promises better conversion rates and guaranteed ROI not to mention increase of open rate for email direct campaigns.

Through employing the right technology and efficient marketing analyst marketers will be able to design the ad campaign in relation to the user’s behavioral data, therefore capture his attention, and drive him right in the funnel and getting the desired results! Money well spent!

There is however a privacy in association with the cookie technology issue (cookie is information in a shape of a “code”  that a Website puts on your computer’s hard disk after agreeing with your browsers default settings so that it can remember something about you at a later time) this directly connects to the behavioral marketing which is still under debate, I personally think it is irrelevant! Do you think the super market is private? Your gym, Shopping malls even banks?! They all have their ways of knowing customer behavioral and therefore target advertisement to suit his needs! So where is the privacy issue! And if there is actually a privacy breach in this sort of marketing, then let it be! Let’s ask the users do they wish to be bombarded with irrelevant advertisement or they would rather get exposed to the right and targeted type of ads tailored to their needs!

As a marketer you can choose to target your ad to a specific behavior, Example, if a visitor is browsing through IT content most of the time, it’s likely that he is interested and maybe working in the IT domain, so targeting latest IT inventions ads for this particular user will encourage click through and possibly leading to a sale!

I must say that behavioral marketing has become essential in these difficult economic times. US and Europe has been effectively using behavioral marketing for several years , according to Forrester reports, behavioral targeting adoption has massively grew from 10% of European advertisers in 2007, to  26% of in 2008., Middle East publishers must look into it sooner than later and I promise it will relieve the distress cause by economic meltdown.