As a business owner trying to sell your product or service, wouldn’t you want to know what your clients need?
Or is your goal to convince them they want something? To make a sale, you basically have to do both.
We live in a world where everything’s getting automated. From harvesting bananas in the wilderness of South America to reporting a problem with your vacuum cleaner to an online chatbot.
Marketing is going the same way, and the new developments in the field of machine learning and automation are speeding up the process in some rather interesting ways.
There are complex algorithms already capable of determining what you, as a potential buyer, might like and what your affinities are in broader terms. Using that knowledge, a crafty salesman can create a strategy that will reel you in hook, line, and sinker.
In this article, we will talk about marketing automation and how the complex field of behavioral psychology can help you get more exposure, leads, and ultimately successful sales.
Read on to learn more about this exciting new technology.
What Is Behavioral Marketing Automation?
Only today! 57% off! End-of-the-season sales like you’ve never seen!
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Our prices are so low you’d be pretty much stealing these end-of-the-season leftover steaks!
… any other inspirational messages you’ve either concocted yourself as a seller or had the pleasure to read would all fall into the category of behavioral marketing. In a way, all marketing is connected to behavioral psychology, come to think of it.
Behavioral psychology is a medical discipline that studies human behavior. It is a complex field that records behavioral patterns and aims to discover what compels humans to act the way they act.
At its core, marketing automation represents the principle of developing ads for your products automatically. Add to that the ‘behavioral psychology’ aspect, and you have a rather new type of algorithm-based automation that is capable of carefully analyzing human psychology—and using the results to help you sell more products.
For the most part, it comes down to analyzing tremendous amounts of data. The smart computers in charge of the behavioral analysis of what buyers want, gather and comb through large amounts of data from previously completed purchases.
They can analyze details such as the buyer’s demographic, gender, education level, and other related or unrelated interests, as well as the time of the year the sale was completed.
Once enough info has been gathered, the computers can come up with a winning marketing strategy for a future marketing campaign (based on previously successful ones). A simple enough principle, but it works like a charm.
Now that we have a basic understanding of what behavior-based marketing automation is, let’s see what you can achieve with it.
What Are The Benefits of Behavior-Based Marketing Automation?
Rather than simply amassing some data and pushing it through a special ‘machine’ that will give you a long spreadsheet at the other end, marketing automation offers much more to sellers.
First of all, understanding what basic human psychology is like is essential to being able to relate to a buyer and offer them your product as a solution to one of their problems. On the other hand, there’s a complex new system that uses the findings about what customers want and turns it into a mighty tool for developing awesome marketing strategies.
Effective branding is essential for the success of marketing automation. A clear and compelling brand identity helps attract potential customers and build trust, making it easier for marketing automation efforts to convert leads into sales. Branding also helps ensure that marketing messages are consistent and on-brand across all marketing channels, including automated emails and social media posts, and LinkedIn automation tools to boost sales and reduce efforts.
If you need some help with defining your brand positioning and developing effective brand messaging, go to the site linked here and let the San Francisco-based professionals handle it.
As a seller, you’d be a fool not to use marketing automation, especially in an age where everyone else does. From finding new leads to convincing them of the worth of your product, marketing automation can be a great option for sellers who want to take their business to an entirely new level.
Here Are a Couple of Examples of The Things Marketing Automation Encompasses:
Automated content delivery across different platforms—SMS, emails, apps, social media posts—all of these can be scheduled ahead of time and automatically delivered where needed. By setting automated response messages and scheduling posts in advance, you can save a lot of time when it comes to managing the customer support part of your business.
Lead segmentation—Not all your leads are created equal and have the same possibility of becoming something more. This is where lead segmentation comes in — rather than browsing through each and every lead you get, an automated system can do this for you and give you an idea of how to approach different leads more efficiently.
Simplifying the customer experience—You can do so by allowing the customer to easily browse your products and services online. You can also make the checkout process quicker, less complex, and more intuitive with the help of marketing automation technology.
Tool integration—As the number of tools used by sellers and marketers is getting higher, the ability to integrate the tools you already have at your disposal is pretty convenient. Instead of multitasking with a vast number of managerial and diagnostics apps, you can bring them all together thanks to marketing automation.
In the passages below, we’ll go into more detail regarding the individual aspects and benefits of behavior-based marketing automation.
Behavior Tracking
Recording customer behavior is the first step that enables smart, algorithm-based technology to do its magic. The relevant info about the habits and purchasing tendencies of users is collected from a wide variety of sources.
Email clicks and webpage visits, for example, represent a rather simple metric that immediately informs you of what users are initially attracted to.
Here are some other ways in which customer behavior is tracked and recorded with marketing automation:
- Online event attendance
- Webinar attendance
- Video views and the number of times a clip was viewed
- Lead magnet downloads
- Cart abandonment strategies
Reacting to Tracked & Recorded Behavior
The degree of automatization that modern-day software is at is truly mind-boggling at times.
Besides gathering all the data, computers are also capable of processing them in a way that gives you results that you can implement right away.
Not so long ago, the drill was getting the computer to do the boring computational work and then get the human operator to make a decision after reviewing the output data.
Nowadays, this is no longer the case, as the computer is perfectly capable of carrying the whole process independently all the way to the finish line.
Here are some of the most important ways in which a reaction can be created from the gathered behavioral indicators:
Simple A/B Testing
Representing possibly the simplest way to measure the efficiency of a certain strategy, A/B testing has been the staple of marketing for a long time.
The premise behind it is simple enough—get two slightly different marketing approaches and juxtapose them. Target two groups of people belonging to a similar demographic and then see which group does better. The group with better responses indicates that the marketing strategy used is more suitable for this audience than the other.
The way machines behind automated marketing do this is similar. For example, if you want to check whether your customers prefer downloading files in PDF or ePub, the automated marketing machine will figure it out for you and immediately optimize the winning option.
Behavior Prediction
While computers behind the marketing automation campaign don’t do voodoo and cannot tell the future, they can have a pretty good guess of it based on historical data. ‘Historia est magistra vitae’ is an ancient Latin saying that illustrates how this works perfectly.
Automated marketing algorithms can browse through historically successful marketing campaigns and see what users like about them. If someone liked a thing once, why wouldn’t they like it again?
Dynamic Content Customization
One of the preferences your customers will reveal about themselves is the type of content they’re into.
Once the automated marketing machine brains pick up on this info, they can start customizing the content directed at different customers accordingly. This way, each of your customers can have a feed of high-quality content that’s specifically tailored to their needs and interests.
Tailored content marketing tools have become the pivot point of many businesses nowadays. The ability to easily create, modify, and deliver high-quality content to your audience will give you a rather clear advantage over your competitors.
For example, many custom web design companies use marketing automation specifically for those purposes. It helps them generate better content and opportunities for their customers.
Scoring
Representing possibly the simplest form of behavior tracking, lead scoring reveals how many times the users performed the behaviors described above. The higher the score, the more likely they will do it again. Thus, it makes more sense to encourage them to do so in the future, too.
This way, you can establish a simple connection—the more a customer does something, the more you reward that behavior. This approach is a well-known marketing strategy, and it’s often used in SEO, which is an essential part of any marketing campaign nowadays.
Teams across the world, whether it’s businesses including SEO companies in the US, Japan, or Eastern Europe, all use the same basic principle to get the feeling for the market.
Removing or Reducing the Number of Manual Tasks
Rather than typing the same product description and thank-you emails once a sale has been made, the automated marketing machine can do this for you fairly easily. This will free up a considerable chunk of your time and can even help you navigate your marketing campaigns and day-to-day sales work with fewer employees.
What’s more, if you put in some effort to make a detailed Q&A page, you can dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend troubleshooting your customers’ complaints. Only the ones with complex problems will contact you, and a large percentage of other, less significant issues can be tackled by the automatic machine-learning mechanism.
Some other processes that can be automated this way include:
- Requesting testimonials
- Sending automated query follow-up emails
- Zoom calls or appointment reminders
- Scheduled social media posts
- Requesting a new credit card when a single payment fails
Delegating these tasks to a machine can free up a gargantuan amount of time which you can then use to do something more productive.
Detailed Reports
Perhaps one of the most useful aspects of marketing automation would be the excellent quality of reports you get. The rough truth of running a company is—you’ll spend a fair chunk of time looking at Excel sheets and all kinds of graphs and reports. The silver lining here is that AI and marketing automation can help alleviate some of the stress that comes with this.
The way this works is fairly straightforward. You can keep track of a wide variety of marketing automation parameters with detailed reporting provided by marketing automation.
Building a Relationship With Your Audience
Whether it’s the existing customers or those that have the potential to become customers, building a solid relationship based on trust is essential.
Behavioral psychology helps us understand what makes people tick and what they need. Getting amazed and wowed by the quality of a product or a service is one thing. But feeling supported in unforeseen circumstances is another major piece of the customer-seller relationship.
As a seller, you want to provide support to your customers, helping them sort out different problems and answer their questions. You also want to keep your customers informed about the new products or services you’re introducing.
Marketing automation enables you to stay on top of the complex and important business of building a lasting relationship with your customers. Having a machine write your emails, send updates, and troubleshoot broken products can be a major asset in your entrepreneurial toolbox.
Conclusion
All in all, behavioral psychology studies what humans are like and what they like to do. Certain behaviors are more likely to repeat themselves than others, and purchasing stuff online is not exempt from this human trait.
Marketing automation is a relatively novel concept in sales, but it is definitely here to stay, and for a good reason. Implementing behavioral findings from the field of psychology in your marketing strategy is not only a good idea but an absolute must in the competitive world of today’s online and offline global markets.
