How to Boost Online Business with Behavioral Targeting

It could be one of the strongest marketing tools you have; so what is behavioral targeting?

Simply explained, behavioral targeting refers to a range of techniques and technologies that online businesses and marketers can use to closely define and target audiences. These tools collect important strategic data about customers’ shopping and browsing habits while on a business’s website, including how they get there and what links they click on.

When used correctly, behavioral targeting strategies allow businesses to observe the online behavior of their customers and then customize their communication with those customers to match. This makes it a more powerful tool than the related demographic targeting, which can focus on groups of customers but not the details themselves.

Unless your online business caters to a very niche market, behavioral targeting can prove a very useful tool. Most ecommerce businesses cater to several different types and groups of customers with different values and habits. With behavioral targeting, you can take all of these details into consideration to deliver the best communication methods available for your customers.

Different Types of Online Behavioral Targeting 

Behavioral targeting is not a single thing that can be given a single definition.  Instead, it is a term that comprises a variety of methods and techniques. Some of the most common of these methods that many online businesses use include the following:

       Customizing Deals – Online retailers can use behavioral targeting to determine which of their products or services a certain customer may be most interested in by seeing which page they visit most often. Once they have a good idea which way customers are leaning in their prospective purchases, retailers can then offer these customers personal deals on those purchases. This can persuade customers to go ahead and make the sale.

       Personalizing Websites – This is a popular method utilized by many major ecommerce sites such as Amazon.com. By analyzing which products a customer has shown the most interest in, online businesses can determine which of their products it would be most beneficial to highlight for those customers. They can then personalize their product highlights for each customer based on these tastes. If customers see a selection of related products next to their online shopping carts, they are more likely to include them as well.

          Personalizing Email – Mass email notification can be an effective marketing tool, but for many online customers it just looks like spam in their inbox. To stand out among these impersonal messages, online companies can personalize customer emails based on their movement around that company’s website. By making the message instantly more relevant to the customer, retailers increase their odds of the customer taking an interest in it.

       Remarketing – This type of online advertisement has proven to be a revolutionary innovation in Internet marketing. Remarketing basically refers to online ads that follow customers from site to site. Retailers analyze behavioral targeting data to find which customers seem the most interested in their products. They can then strategically purchase ad space on other sites that display their marketing specifically to these customers. In this way, online retailers can keep up unobtrusive communication with their customers even after they have left the retailer’s site.

Privacy Concerns with Behavioral Targeting

While behavioral targeting is a powerful tool, it is not without its controversies. Chief among these is the distaste that many customers often have knowing that their personal data is being collected without their control.

If you don’t use it right, behavioral targeting can make your customers feel like you’re stalking them. And if you’re too persistent with your communication to a single customer based on behavioral targeting data, then you’re just going to look like a spammer and drive away customers who might otherwise be interested in your business. It becomes a fine line to walk; ideally, you want to do most of your data collection anonymously, collecting only a shopper’s habits and not their personal information.

If businesses do target one customer specifically, make your communication brief, courteous, and to the point. Don’t bombard customers with continuous marketing across all platforms by spamming their email and making every ad they see based on your business. With behavioral targeting, a little bit goes a long way.

5 Quick Tips for Great Content Marketing

Content marketing and other online search engine optimization strategies have become more and more important as print media has slowly been challenged in favor of Internet interaction. As I have grown my business and worked with other companies to grow theirs, I have seen the Internet grow from a niche marketing tool into the primary vehicle for companies of all shapes and sizes reach consumers. This has included the growth of content marketing from a relative marketing strategy to an essential tool of building brand trust and image.

Here are a few major do’s and don’ts for how business’s can successfully use content marketing to help advance their bottom line.

1. ESTABLISH YOUR AUTHORIAL VOICE

One of the biggest pieces of advice for content marketers is a tip that has likely been repeated hundreds or thousands of times since content marketing became an industry essential: Make sure all content marketing materials have a distinct authorial voice. While there is much to be said for attempting to adopt the voice of an entire business or corporation, there is also something to be said for creating content that is compelling, well-written, and sparked with personality. Most good content marketing writers innately know how to blend an undercurrent of compelling authorial voice with a professional and engaging tone. Do not publish content articles written like dry business memorandums. Content marketing is aimed at an everyday audience, either browsing a business’s website for case studies and blogs or searching Google for articles about specific topics. In both cases, readers will be more drawn to writing that feels like it came from a down-to-earth blogger than they will be to content that is clearly aimed at boosting internet traffic and selling products or services.

2. HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY

Content marketing articles are more or less worthless if they have nothing new to say on the topic at hand. Many content marketers trawl popular buzz topics in an effort to find out what is trending on Google, Twitter, or Facebook at any given time. There’s nothing wrong with this tactic as long as you take a news story and uses it as a springboard for an article that offers unique viewpoints, adds to the news story with updates or other relevant information, or poses questions of its own. Simply paraphrasing articles or blogs already published by reputable news sources will prove counter-productive. In other words, content marketers need creativity, analytical skill, and journalistic prowess to be successful. However, if a content provider can add his or her own spin to a popular topic, authorial voice will likely appear as well, and readers will reward the extra effort with more clicks and shares.

3. KEEP IT FRESH AND INTERESTING

It is far too easy for content marketers to fall into a rut with their material by not thinking outside of the box. For instance, a content marketer running a campaign for an educational institution should not only write blogs and articles revolving around schools and students. Myriad topics can be connected to education, from the state of the job market to trending health topics to questions of finance and inflation. Content marketers who are willing to venture into unexplored subject matter will stand a better chance of increasing their client’s Internet presence and boosting their own effectiveness.

4. KNOW WHEN TO WRAP UP

Similarly, content can become stagnant or dull even in the space of a single article or blog. A good content marketer is a writer who knows instinctually when he or she has run out of interesting things to say on a topic and when the content needs to move toward a conclusion. That is not to say that lengthier articles don’t have an audience—they do, especially among academic types—but traditionally, the attention span of Internet readers is shorter than that of the print media audiences of old.

5. STAY RELEVANT

It is easy to go browsing through news topics for content ideas. However, if a news story is more than a day or two old, chances is that the content’s lifespan is already running out, at least in terms of search engine optimization. A writer who believes he or she has something vital to say on a topic should not be scared away by “old” news, but in most cases, the same rules apply to content marketers as apply to journalists: if you aren’t one of the first to weigh in on a topic, there may be little point in expending the time and effort to weigh in at all. Instead, content marketers should consider holding off on old news topics and waiting for a similar story—or better yet, a news update—to come along and reignite the conversation.

Core Basics for an Effective Content Marketing Strategy

No matter how powerful social media and the presence it creates can be, efforts towards social marketing are inhibited by a company’s ability to publish high quality content that accurately — and subtly — publicizes the brand’s messaging. There is a lot of clutter out there on the Internet, and to keep your company alive and surging you need to form the right strategy in order to stand out against competition.

Content publishing – whether it is a whitepaper, blog, press release, news article, or webpage – requires interesting and informative material. People often skip right over chunks of text, because there are so many other (shorter) options to read; it is crucial for marketers to form well-found messages and write content around them.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

·      Timeliness: Whatever the post or piece is, it needs to come out at the proper time. This is especially important when companies are sharing industry-related trends and popular information that could get lost in an upsurge of publications.

·      Quality versus Quantity: The age-old battle is easily settled in the content war. Companies can benefit by promoting as much pro-marketing content as possible, without sacrificing its quality. This is important for reasons explained in the next section.

·      Exposure and Ranking: The primary goal of online publishing is to support a brand’s websites and online assets. Every article, mention, blog, and post increases the chances a potential client will find a company in the first place. Due to technical reasons with modern search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo), Internet powerhouses have begun efforts to meet the needs of online users in order to provide well-meaning content on search results. In essence, poor-quality content is ranked lower and disappears. Long-lasting, quality, and timely content on the other hand, can silently generate exposure with minimal effort.

·       Share-through: Create content that is worthy of a share and post it on major platforms where is can easily be seen and forwarded.  This necessitates making sure the content is relevant and interesting and taps your audience’s attention to want to take the time to pass along and/or share via word of mouth with other people within their social networks, both online and offline.

Essential Time Management Tips for Entrepreneurs

Time management is not something that all individuals are born with, nor is it something that’s often taught in schools—but nevertheless, time management is something that can obtain. Not only can they, but they should, especially if they happen to be business owners. There is no one who more urgently needs time management capabilities than the entrepreneur. Running a start-up or a small business is always challenging, but it becomes exponentially less taxing when you know how to make the best possible use of your precious hours and minutes.

It takes some discipline and some practice, especially at the beginning, as you seek to cultivate the proper habits and rituals. With that said, business owners who begin working on their time management skills now can find themselves exerting mastery over their time, sooner rather than later.

KEY STEPS TO EFFICIENT TIME MANAGMENT

1. ‘CALENDERIZE’

The first step, and one that will seem obvious to some but revelatory to others, is to take the time needed to put everything on a calendar. The need to ‘calendarize’ your time is great. The time you spend on every task, including driving, shopping, having meetings of phone conferences—all of this needs to go on the calendar.

Business owners should not only include the time it will take for each daily task, but also the time of day when they intend to have everything finished. Schedule the time when your day will end, and try to abide by that. You need some down time to recharge your batteries, and, for many business owners, the only way to get that down time is to schedule it.

Making a calendar will take up additional time at the start of each day. The goal, though, is for it to ultimately open up still more time, as you better prioritize and coordinate your daily activities.

2. TACKLE YOUR BIGGEST CHALLENGES EARLY

Another secret to effective time management is tackling the most arduous and daunting tasks early in the day. You need to address your biggest challenges when you are at your peak—your most alert, your most energetic, and your most productive. For the vast majority of us, that’s in the morning.

The best-case scenario of tackling your biggest challenges early in the day is that you put them behind you, and you can breathe a sigh of relief. The worst-case scenario is that you have to deal with follow-up issues, which may throw your daily routine off just a little, yet it’s still better to handle these issues on the same day rather than roll them over until morning.

3. FILE AS YOU GO

Another tip is to avoid the need to schedule “filing time” by simply filing things as they materialize. One of the quickest ways to create more work for yourself is to start a to-file pile, because then you just have to stop and schedule a block of time for filing, at some later date. By contrast, filing as you go eliminates this need and allows you to plow forward with greater efficiency.

This is true not just for physical document but also for e-mails, contacts, and other important pieces of data.

4. DELEGATE

Of course, time management and delegation go hand in hand. When you have people working with you who you can trust and depend on, that makes everything easier, and it allows you to farm out assignments and free up more time for yourself. Many business owners will say that they just can’t trust the people who work with them—but if that’s the case, you have a personnel problem, not merely a time management one, and you need to address it urgently.

In all business contexts, there are assignments that can easily be delegated. It may be something as simple as running an errand, but that’s still time saved, and one less thing you have to deal with.

5. MAP OUT TOMORROW’S TO-DOs

While taking some down time in the evenings is important, it can sometimes be helpful to take just a few moments in the evening to prepare for the next day. Mapping out your appointments and starting the next day’s to-do list can help you to get a running start when the next work day begins.

6. MAKE USE OF WAIT TIME

Still another piece of time management advice: Make use of ‘waiting’ times. Whether you’re in a waiting room before an appointment or you’re on a plane, every minute counts—and there are some easy steps you can take to redeem that time. Whether it’s responding to e-mails or confirming LinkedIn connections via smartphone, you can absolutely use this time to your advantage.

7.  MANAGE MEETING TIME

Insist on seeing an agenda before attending any meeting. The agenda will let you know if it’s really something you need to spend your time on, and it also suggests that the meeting will be run in a somewhat orderly fashion. Get an agenda, or else politely decline the meeting.

One final thing to remember: Avoid multi-tasking, If there’s something that needs doing, give it your complete focus—and avoid having to re-do it, or spend more time on it than it really necessitates.

One final thing to remember: Avoid multi-tasking. If there’s something that needs doing, give it your complete focus—and avoid having to re-do it, or spend more time on it than it really necessitates.