Predictive behavioral targeting is the practice of anticipating the needs and wants of your current clients and using this information to base your marketing decisions on the assumption that the needs of your current clients will closely mock the needs of your future clients. Behavioral targeting by itself is generally defined as identifying consumer’s browsing habits to help you make educated targeted decisions when it comes to future marketing and advertising campaigns. Thus, the only difference with predictive behavioral targeting is that you simply use past trends and analysis to predict what your consumers will be interested in purchasing in the future.
The word predictive can be misleading, as you do not necessarily have to foretell the future buying habits in order to increase sales. In fact, it is not so much an educated guess as a careful study of the trends and patterns of your clients browsing habits. After a careful behavioral study of a select group of your best customers, you can anticipate the moves of other customers which will help increase your marketing efforts since you already essentially know what they want. The only thing left to do is inform them that you do in fact have the product or service they want before they have a chance to research it with your competition.
A large part of predictive behavioral targeting is based on being ahead of the bell curve. For example, the iPhone has largely been a global success because it took the leap forward before its competitors to give users apps and full easy touch screen internet access. Now, as a result of iPhones predictive behavioral targeting any phone that can come close to the iPhone’s unique capabilities is compared as a knock-off or attempted competitor instead of a must have innovative device.
Similarly, when employed correctly predictive behavioral targeting can be the gateway into providing consumers with everything they need before they even realize they need it, which almost always guarantees a sale. For online businesses this may mean anticipating the browsing habits of consumers within your website by offering suggestions or by linking to websites that you anticipate they will visit leading them to your products. Consultants and marketing campaigns are a large part of applying what you learn with predictive behavioral targeting, but while the initial investment for a new marketing direction may be a little costly, the pay off will come when you tally your quarter sales profits.