Behavioral Marketing is a discipline that many businesses now believe to be a crucial component of their marketing mix. A part of this is Behavioral Targeting. Rather than focusing on basic demographics and lifestyles to pin down your audience, it allows you to target based on past online (and offline) behavior such as recent purchases, products owned, trips taken, events attended, websites visited, and more.
At the same time, getting the necessary data for effective behavioral targeting can be difficult without significant monetary investment. That’s where Facebook’s Behavioral Targeting comes in, helping you narrow down the most effective targeting methods without significant (or additional) costs.
Why Use Facebook as a Targeting Tool?
Including Facebook’s tool in your mix is good for two reasons. First, your customers are likely to be on it. According to Pew Research last September, 71% of adults had spent time on Facebook, compared with less than 22% having spent time on Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. And of course Facebook had over 1.2 billion active users worldwide in Q1 2014, and over 120 million in the United States.
Secondly, while on Facebook, your customers are more likely to share personal information. And if you market to teenagers, recent studies have shown that they have really become more open about sharing their personal information on social media. (Kids these days!) While they are taking steps to ensure their information is visible only to friends, that information is available to Facebook and, as an extension, to those who market on Facebook.
Behavioral Targeting Options
As you might imagine, Facebook offers a lot of behavioral targeting options. You can target users based on what mobile device they use, whether and what kind of donations they have recently made, whether they are in the market for – or recently purchased – an automobile, their recent digital activities (from gaming to online shopping), and more.
The subcategories available delve even further. You can target according to whether they are business or leisure travelers, home or car insurance expiration date, what credit card the user owns, etc. Facebook receives this data from two sources: directly from users, and via a number of external data providers – many of whom are Verdi’s strategic partners.
How Can You Use the Data?
This doesn’t require a lot of imagination. As an online clothing retailer like Trunk Club, you may want to target affluent males who have made recent online clothing purchases and travel frequently for business. Or, if you sell an Android app, you can target Android users who have made recent app purchases, showing their willingness to buy apps. And the list goes on…
So if you’re in the business-to-consumer (B2C marketing arena, Facebook’s behavioral targeting helps you weed out unintentional reach and focus your investment specifically on the audience who may be in the market for your product or service.