A few years ago, only multinational B2Bs with massive marketing budgets could afford to track digital behavioral data and use it to implement personalized strategies.
That’s drastically changed.
Today, it’s easier than ever to collect different types of behavioral data on your leads. Not to mention, intent data adds an entirely fresh level of tracking.
Despite this, many B2Bs don’t realize how important behavioral information is for building well-rounded experiences – not just for leads, but current customers as well.
Let’s go over a few ways to collect this data and how to use it to your advantage.
5 Types of Behavioral Data Collection
Data is easy to collect if you know where to look. You can grab information on your visitors and leads through multiple places.
- Your website: Google Analytics (basic), cookies, and other deeper browsing tracking platforms.
- Search results: Use Google keyword research and tools like Answer the Public to see what questions and problems people have.
- Email: Who opens emails on which topics? Who is most/least engaged?
- Social media: Who makes up your social audience? Where do they work? What’s their job role? Do they follow your competitors?
- Intent data: Using first-party information from your own site and third-party data from other sources, you can track behavior with context to connect with your leads and customers at various stages.
Intent data is interesting because it tells you the “why” behind your website visitors and adds context to numbers.
Finding and collecting data isn’t the biggest problem most B2Bs have. In fact, most B2Bs have two major problems with data. First, it’s stuck in silos and inaccessible to marketers at the right time. Second, it’s either outdated or was never correct in the first place.
How to Leverage Digital Behavioral Data for Creating Personalized Buyer (and Customer) Journeys
Behavioral data is important on so many levels. It’s vital for creating valuable content for your leads, building relationships with current customers, tracking your campaign performance, and so much more.
Let’s first look at two tactics you can use to harness your data and make sure it’s accurate. Then we’ll go over some ways to use your data for creating B2B marketing strategies.
Restructure to Breakdown Siloed Data
When asked about their biggest hurdle to creating an awesome buyer/customer experience, a third of businesses say they can’t properly leverage data they already have.
It’s easier said than done, but before you can put your data to use you need to make sure it’s accessible.
For some businesses, this may include changing the workplace culture to break down department bureaucracies and allow the free flow of data. For others, it may mean consolidating data structures so everything is available to marketers in one convenient location.
Each business is unique, so, unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast answer to fixing this problem.
Only Collect Information from High-Quality Leads
A majority of businesses are using data that’s up to 40% incorrect to guide their marketing strategies.
It’s no surprise that only 1 in 5 organizations have effective personalization strategies in place.
B2B organizations already struggle with the problem of short data expiration dates – an issue their B2C counterparts don’t really have to worry about. That’s why it’s so important to make sure you’re only collecting high-quality data from the beginning.
Get rid of forms and ONLY collect email addresses from genuine business addresses – that’s it.
From there, you can use AI technology to connect the dots. Like so:
Use Digital Behavioral Data to Segment Your Audience Based on Buying Stage
Digital behavioral data is perhaps the best tool at your disposal for scoring leads based on the buying stage.
Intent data, for example, can tell you exactly where your lead is in the buying cycle as well as which competitors they’ve already researched and other useful information.
When you understand your lead’s stage of the buying process, you can use this to personalize your email marketing and retargeting communications with unique offers.
Create the Types of Content Your Leads Crave
Not every segment of your target audience wants to consume the same type of content.
- 49% want video
- 64% want podcasts
- 76% want infographics
- 91% want webinars
By tracking visitor behavior, you can easily identify patterns and figure out exactly which types of content your leads want. Remember that, in this respect, there’s often a gap between survey answers and behavior – so always go with what the data says.
Use Digital Behavioral Data to Stay Connected with Customers
Your leads aren’t the only ones you need to track. New research shows that 80% of frequent buyers will switch at least once every two years for reasons, such as:
- Not meeting buyer needs
- Not building a human relationship
- Not using digital technology to improve the customer experience
By tracking behavioral data, you can stay connected to customers about their concerns, questions, and problems before they churn. Intent data can further help by alerting you if your customers start researching competitors.
Identify Your Most Profitable Marketing Channels
Of course, data isn’t worth a thing if it can’t help you squeeze the most revenue from your digital marketing efforts!
Use data about the behavior of your customers and leads to figure out where are your best chances to drive profits.
Is most of your social traffic coming from LinkedIn? Use that platform for retargeting.
Where do visitors go when they leave your website? Use that information to fill content marketing gaps.
You have plenty of rabbit holes to dig here.
Harness the Power of Digital Behavioral Data and Make it Work for You
An effective personalization strategy starts on your own website. Hushly provides multiple strategies for you to harness the power of data and create hyper-personalized landing pages and content for your visitors – whether known or anonymous.
With adaptive content hubs, an algorithm tracks the behavior of a visitor on your website and continues recommending similar content. Yep, it’s just like Netflix.
Ready to make data work for your business? Check out the Hushly software in action now to get started!