This article is a summary of an eBook written by Rob Graham called Fishing From a Barrel: Using Behavioral Targeting to Reach the Right People With the Right Ads At the Right Time. You can get the pdf of the free behavioral targeting e-book here: The Essence of Behavioral Targeting.

As this is a very broad e-book, composed of nine chapters that comprehensively explain the value of behavioral targeting and how it works, this article will focus on certain aspects of the book.

A World of Individuals

Behavioral targeting is all about targeting me, and not targeting us. We need to embrace a new marketing paradigm shift which incorporates the fact taht we are unique individuals with unique needs, and stop advertisers from pretending that they need to create ads that reach out to as many people as possible, and make that their primary goal.

Even as consumers share the same interests, that doesn’t mean that they are the same. In fact, each customer is still unique and has many other interests. The key to behavioral targeting is having a good understanding to unlock the essence of a single individual and talk to that individual in his or her own language.

The Promise of Behavioral Targeting

The focus of this e-book is the effective use of behavioral targeting in its applications towards online advertising. This technique promises to make a win-win-win situation for the publishers, advertisers and consumers. Through cookies, a website will know so much about a consumer. For example, a site will know what the consumer is interested in, and know about what he expresses to be a more specific version of his interests. Through behavioral targeting, a website will recognize that a consumer is showing purchase intent, and even cost issues if the consumer shows attributes of delaying decision making.

With behavioral targeting, you tend to look at advertising the way we don’t normally look at it: as a noble event. A consumer will see relevant ads that caters to his desires and needs, presented opportunities to take advantage of offers that are agreeable and relevant to his current needs. An advertiser will know the specific interests of a user, with which banner ads were uncapable of doing. Publishers can make money by tracking a database of characteristics by visitors, creating profiles that they can sell to advertisers.

The Fine Art of Targeting

The old technique of advertising before the Internet was focused on quantity and quality, where consumers are presented with ads that sometimes interested us, but mostly didn’t. This old form of advertising has trained us that in the marketing process, our involvement wasn’t really necessary. But that can’t be further from the truth. Online has changed things dramatically. Online we can share our opinions, thoughts and questions. Advertisers no longer look at us as button clicking monkeys, rather as individual consumers wanting to engage in a dialogue with advertisers. Consumers as the questions and follow the path that interests us. It’s no longer a one size fits all thing.

An advertising message that has reached 1,000,000 of the wrong people is less effective than a message that has reached the right person. Advertisers should learn to listen to consumers, to remove irrelevancy in ads. They should understand that consumers like to be treated as individuals, and should try to listen to them. There is no single answer to how advertisers should talk to consumers to make them listen. One way to do that is watch the activity of consumers and get a sense of their needs and wants.

Striving for Effectiveness

To summarize, advertisers can take advantage of behavioral targeting by getting out of the frame of mind of a traditional advertiser and following these guidelines. First, it’s very pointless and ineffecient to reach everyone with the same advertising message. Second, reaching consumers with the wrong advertising message for far too many times will only irritate these consumers and not produce anything positive. Third, More than consumers need advertisers, it is advertisers that need consumers. Fourth, the window of opportunity for making good first impressions is very limited for advertisers.

Traditional Advertising, like direct marketing campaigns are such a waste, that they actually expect around 98 percent of consumers will reject or ignore the message they sent. Natural Resources and money are ewasted unnecessarily. A totally inefficient system.

With behavioral targeting, there is an ongoing relationship between targeted consumer and advertiser. If a targeted consumer sees an ad that he doesn’t like, the advertiser may send out a new ad with a stronger message and stronger offers, and then another offer, and if the consumer still doesn’t want anything to do with the ads, then the advertiser can take him out of the target list.

The most popular device for personal communication is the cellphone, and so it is very appealing to marketers. Exploitation of this medium is the subject of many studies and attempts to develop innovative strategies, no lesser among them location-based services (LBS) and their potential as initiatives for targeted advertising. According to Mitchelle and Whitmore, LBS are services enhanced by and dependent on information about the position of a mobile device. Services include navigation, entertainment, site-based purchasing, traffic updates, location specific promotion and advertising.

Location-based Advertising

Location-based advertising (LBA) is an initiative to advertise to a cellphone from an identified sponsor specified by its location from the consumer. This study attempts to understand the evaluation that consumers generally have over this new marketing tool. Some may view it as beneficial, while others intrusive of their privacy. The study attempts to answer two questions: Would consumers see greater value in LBA that is pushed to them than LBA that consumers receive only upon request (“pull”)? Would consumers perceive greater value in LBA with brand advertising than LBA with promotional offers?

This study is relevant to replace traditional marketing which is product-centric, to one that is customer-centric, giving marketers the capability to reach consumers individually anywhere and anytime they are ready to purchase.

History of LBA

Marketers have used location information about their customers every since the start of direct-mail marketing. For a time, the huge boost of the Internet and online commerce have made location information irrelevant, but new technologies have been made to give customers personalized and location-specific services.

In the past, location data was obtained manually, with consumers inputting information about their location. This method is cheap and does not require special equipment. However, consumers may not know what their location is and limits the capacity of marketers to give consumers personalized services. Technology nowadays have the ability to automatically locate mobile consumers individually.

One of the first to use LBA was ZagMe from the United Kingdom. During the year 2000, ZagMe was available as an SMS-based shopper-alert service that consumers opt in to to receive promotions and advertisements when they are inside a particular mall. This was successful for a time, but was only good for activation; only a small number of people went back to reactivate the service.

Push and Pull LBA

Location-based advertising is permission-based because of the negative reactions and perceptions to spam and the call for adhering to regulatory pressures. Pull LBA is an advertising message which is sent to the wireless consumer who requests for this service once. A consumer sends an explicit request to receive ads on his mobile phone, and these ads are about the products that are close to his or her area, for example products in a mall.

Push advertising, on the other hand, is when a consumer receives advertisements on his or her mobile phone related to the products near his or her location and the preferences that consumer previously stated. Marketers may love push LBA because it doesn’t require activating or deactivating amd cam trigger impulse buying, but it is definitely more intrusive.

LBA Message Content: Advertising and Promotion

Text mobile marketing can come in different forms, including special offers and ads for brand building. In this study, brand advertising and promotion is used. An example for promotion has been used by Reebok, where mobile consumers were sent a message that said whoever is first to go to their nearby store will receive a free pair of new shoes. Brand building and promotions are investigation to see whether consumers value both differently.

This study focuses on the perceived value that consumers have over LBA. Value is defined as trade-offs between benefits and costs that are incurred when one consumes a service. For this study, the cost is focused on privacy concerns that consumers may have because their location is being tracked.

This is the summary of an article by Youjae Yi. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: The Influence Of Contextual Priming on Advertising Effects.

Product advertisements may be evaluated differently by different users. For example, if one ad implies that a car is large, one person might think then that the car is comfortable, while another person sees that the car has low gas mileage. The former thinks the car is a benefit, while the latter obviously has a negative perception after seeing the ad. The question is, what determines how one interprets product information that could hae various meanings?

This study is based on findings which show that contextual factors determine how an advertisement’s ambiguous information is perceived by users. It is proposed that priming certain advertisement attributes can affect how a consumer processes ambiguous information of a product. Priming refers to exposure to stimulus which influences a response to stimulus at a later time.

Contextual Priming Effects

Research shows that the way people interpret information depends on which related concepts are most easily accessible at the time of processing the information. These accessible concepts tend to guide information interpretation, and highly accessible attributes can be used to interpret a product’s ambiguous description. Certain attributes are highly accessible to a user when the user has been previously exposed to the attribute. The more recent the activation of a concept, the greater that concept’s accessibility is.

An ad’s environment which may include articles of the webpage containing that ad and even ads from competitors, can make some attributes highly accessible. How an advertised product is evaluated would therefore depend on the attributes activated by contextual factors that prece the advertisement.

Methods

The first experiment was participated by forty students. The product is personal computers, and the key ad message was on the availability of several features. For negative interpretation, ease of use was the attribute chosen, and for positive interpretation, it was versatility. Results in this experiment show that target brand evaluations were indeed influenced by priming the ad context with various product attributes. There are several limitations in this experiment. First is the fact that the users are forced to write about what they think when considering a pc purchase after they have seen the target ad. That may have drawn the attention of the subjects to attributes that are drawn from an intrusive manner resulting in biases towards the priming hypothesis.

The second experiment was made to correct limitations in the first experiment. This new experiment is different in the elimination of elicting attributes which may be intrusive in distoring how the users process ad information. Another difference is that the sample size right now is composed of 120 students, large enough for structural equation analysis. Results show that when a given attribute is primed, the chances for this attribute to be used for product interpretation will be high.

Implications

This study has implications for persuasion research. Indirect persuasion is seen to be effective in which neutral information, such as a bag’s weight, primes a consumer to encode the information with target benefits such as ease of handling. These indirect persuasions are much more beneficial compared to traditional techniques because they are found to have higher stability over time, and get less negative responses in comparison to direct persuasion.

This study also has relevance towards advertisers. Advertisers are made to understand that ad context may influence their consumers to favor their products, or can lead to unwanted unintended effects.

This is the summary of an article by Andrea Addis, Giuliano Armando, and Eloisa Vargiu. You can get the pdf of the behavioral targeting article here: Profiling Users to Perform Contextual Advertising

Most of the advertisements that we see online are called sponsored links, from sponsored search advertising and contextual advertising. These ads are small textual messages that are supported by all of the major search engines today. Sponsored search advertising are ads that are placed in search engine results page after a search query, while contextual advertising is putting web pages in the content of third party web pages. An ad network acts as intermediary by selecting advertisements to increase ad network and publisher revenue and improving the experience of online users.

This study states that it is also important to personalize advertisements based on the interests of individual users. In this context, users are requiring representation from specific websites about their interests and preferences.

User Profiling

People have a hard time knowing what they want, but if they see it, they can easily recognize it. Thus, relevance feedback is born, and people now rate items as uninteresting or interesting. Pretty soon, the system will be very accurate in classifying whether items are negative or positive.

There are two types of profiling: behavior-based and knowledge-based. Knowledge-based often use interviews and questionnaires to obtain knowledge regarding users. Behavior-based profiling uses machine learning techniques to obtain user behavioral patterns. To obtain user data using this technique, behavioral logging is used.

Most recommender systems use behavior-based user profiling, specifically a binary class model is used to represent what are uninteresting or interesting to users. Furthermore, choosing the right machine algorithm depends on the amount and kind of information available, the nature of items, and the kind of service.

A context-based User Profiler

The architecture of the system to create user profiles proposed in this study is made up of four main modules: statistical document analyzer, semantic word analyzer, semantic network handler, and profiler.

The statistical document analyzer creates a bag of words and removes those words that are non-informative, such as pronouns, verbs, conjunctions and prepositions. Each remaining term is then weighted, and usually only 60-90 terms, known as features, are retained.

The semantic word analyzer creates a bag of synsets that are related to the features that are selected. It also queries WordNet, a lexical database found online. Each feature gets corressponding synsets from WordNet. The profiler is responsible for extracting user profiles. The WordNet domain hierarchy is used in this part. Here, a user profile is represented in terms of its WordNet domain categories and the weights ranging from 0 to 1.

Results and Conclusion

Experimental Results have confirmed that the system is use has the capacity of profiling users. Currently, the authors are performing experiments which consider user histories, as this study is preliminary concerned only on creating user profiles. The system profiles users in terms of given categories that belong to a taxonomy and a set of documents that are representative of the user. The reference taxonomy used is WordNet domains while Wikipedia is the document source, and that the proposed approach is indeed effective. The authors are optimistic that this new approach is usable for contextual advertising.

Behavioral targeting is a strategy to effectively disseminate timely advertisements to the right person at the right time. This strategy has been put under fire because of concerns regarding privacy. The need for effective tools for marketing is as glaring as the need to survive in the world of business.

Behavioral targeting is an interesting way of marketing in the internet apart from the conventional strategies. It presents a good vantage point for entrepreneurs on how to place their marketing plan. The ability to see opportunities for business expansion, when or when not to move, and which group of people to target are information that are critically needed by any entrepreneur to have better profit. In the on-going struggle to keep the internet business flowing, behavioral targeting might answer the call in the need for effective ways to do advertising with high returns.

Changing how advertising works

It changed the way we look at advertising and the internet. It has proven us what personal information from possible consumer can do to have a booming online business. The concept on how behavioral targeting strategy is an idea of gathering personal information and past transactions in the internet. With that, you can organize your marketing moves as accurate as whom would you advertise your products and services.

How behavioral targeting works

The internet has made distance and cultural differences disappear in just a click. DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) is a technology used by the service providers and governments in a wide range of applications including behavioral targeting. It enables advanced security functions as well as internet data mining, eavesdropping, and censorship. This is also done with cookies, which are text files that are sent to the web browser from the web server that’s hosting the web pages being queried. The fact that cookies can identify the user/web browser combination is top to our discussion about behavioral targeting, because the behavioral targeting process installs additional cookies specifically to track what web pages have been viewed.

A promising advertising tool

Using that information to make timely advertisements which are specific to the needs of individuals is imperative to get better ROI (Return of Investments). Targeted internet marketing comes at an appropriate time when the competition for online supremacy is a battle to the wire. Entrepreneurs will use any tool to take significant advantage over competitors in today’s market situation. Behavioral marketing is a promising tool to win the competition for better ROI and to adapt to the paramount challenges online marketing poses.

Privacy concerns

Indeed, behavioral targeting offers a lot of promising opportunities to the entrepreneur. However, this concept has been rocked by concerns regarding privacy. The personal details that are gathered are very accurate and it entails name, address, websites visited and purchases made. That information can be used in bad motives such as identity theft or bogus advertisements to lure a person into releasing money. This scrutiny about behavioral targeting affects the public acceptance to be the mainstream marketing strategy.

Conclusion

Surely, for entrepreneurs, the need for more effective ways to disseminate their advertisements at lesser cost and greater returns is continually a greater perspective. Consumers alike will benefit from these concepts because they will get the advertisements of products and services that are of their interest and need. Behavioral targeting must be the messiah to the on going struggle for the best marketing strategy.

In 2007, it became clear that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft prioritize advertising after they each purchased online advertising companies. The search engine is an advertising platform, generating traffic through the search function. This is the summary of an article by Theo Rhöle, which discusses the mediating role of search engines between user and advertiser. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Desperately seeking the consumer..

Why search engine marketing is successful

Search engine marketing is successful because it doesn’t have the problems of traditional advertising. This includes poor consumer models, crudely based on environment or lifestyle, among others. Online searches are stored and that data determines the ads you will see, and respond to. This method is cheaper, meaning better ROI (return of investment). Another problem is consumer tendency to block out ads. We know this in television, and in traditional online ads, pop up blockers is very popular. Search engine marketing capitalizes on the popularity of the searching service to make targeted advertising. The consumers will sense an instant connection to the advertisers.

Brief history of search engine marketing

Search engine marketing probably started with banner advertising in 1994, where advertisers pay on a CPM (cost-per-mile) basis. This didn’t work because consumers don’t stay long in a website. Ultimately, they are more interested in the search results. This is followed by contextual advertising, first introduced by GoTo.com in 1998. Search results were auctioned to advertisers and they are made to pay on a CPC (cost-per-click) basis. With this method, expensive demographic research for advertising is avoided and a direct communication between consumer-advertiser is available. However, this method is inclined more to the favor of the advertisers than the consumers.

Behavioral targeting

This is followed by behavioral targeting; a more complicated process involving several methods to determine when a user is most-likely to respond to advertisements. Large networks and portals are used for this method since a lot of data is needed. For example, Yahoo’s Papadopolous has the power to accurately see user searches, ad clicks and sites visited; high quality data exploitation for commercial purposes. However, behavioral targeting is limited by the network’s reach. Google, Yahoo!, etc. all have limitations in this respect, but personalization of search takes care of this problem.

First of all, search relevance is not improving; people are still searching with a couple of terms with unclear implications. This and the data to be indexed is increasing. Personalization stores personal data for a long time and associating it into the search process. Furthermore, it uses three steps to improve relevance; user data collection method, profile storage and personalization method.

Three steps to improve search relevance

First is user data collection. User data collection is personalized by examining a user’s behavior to spot their interests. Implicit inference can be done by analyzing how user clicks the result list, among other methods. Second is, profile storage. Profile storage allows data to be used in various search processes. Storage can be on the side of the client or user. It can also be stored adaptively or statically; adaptively means the data can change with respect to changes in user preference. Data will then be used in the search process with a personalization method. It can be done by modification of search query or results re-ranking through the user’s personal profile. Third is personalization methods. Personalization methods are not standardized. However, they have already been implemented in social searches and recommender systems.

Use of personalization

Personalization has been used in groups through collective relevance feedback. These are called social search. One example are the Swickis which allow users to search around a certain subject area where one sets the parameters or query expansions. Furthermore, Swickis get feedback from users by voting for or against shown results. The Swicki user also has control over the displayed advertisements.  Swickis allow for more interactivity and transparency between users and advertisers, treating users as community members and not anonymous searchers. There is more democracy, but more importantly, the bond between user and advertiser is tightened.

Recommender systems use user online behavior to display recommendations and not information. An example is PersonalWeb. You can customize this webpage to your preferences, and it will proactively give out recommendations of new information sources that you can choose to accept or not. There is an implicit personal data collection based on user behavior and processed to send out its targeted personalized content and relevant advertising that gets better as more data accumulates. Other recommender systems even use the documents stored in your hard disks to base their recommendations from. It is possible that eventually, ads could even get around the psychological avoidance plans of users.

In fact, online marketing and online search has merged significantly and has shown great progress. Furthermore, personalized search has shown that user’s data autonomy is likely to become obsolete.

A kind of customer profiling in online firms is called behavioral targeting. This method uses 3^rd party cookies to know the browsing behavior of users. This method is quite effective, but some concerned citizens are calling it an invasion of privacy. This concern is even more prevalent with the cooperation of Internet service providers (ISPs), who intercept web traffic without user consent. This is the summary of an article by Daniel Rice, which discusses a simple solution involving user compensation in light of privacy concerns over behavioral targeting. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Behavioral targeting and economic compensation

Dangers of shared information

Individuals can provide online information about themselves to help the cause of businesses and other organizations. For example, individuals may share information about how many times they drink alcoholic beverages in a day. This helps doctors make better diagnosis, but also exposes the individual to abuse because of that shared information.

Targeting for online marketing

The essential elements to targeting are looking for the right targeting segment and handing out the right advertisement towards that segment. These elements make advertisement much cheaper, because advertising companies don’t have to bombard individuals with undirected advertisement; they will just focus on the individuals who are most likely to respond to their advertisements. They do this by implementing behavior profiling, which obtains several kinds of information from users, including, site registration data, keyword searches, demographic data IP address, country, zip code, history of ad exposures, among others.

Privacy concerns for behavioral targeting

Online advertisers resort to other ways to obtain information if the former doesn’t work out. They can use behavioral targeting, which cooperates with ISPs involving secret collection of user data. As expected, privacy advocates are on the watch. They even appealed to the government to appoint a privacy czar. This wasn’t approved but privacy was listed as top priority, and measures were done to secure privacy, specifically online trust issues. On the other hand, surveys show that trust is still a concern among majority of individuals.

Economic compensation as a solution

One simple solution to this problem is for advertisers to compensate users for allowing them to obtain third party information using behavioral targeting. For example, when a user visits the website, http://www.getstuffforless.net, that user will receive some form of compensation if he lets advertisers get info from him. More compensation will be awarded if he pries deeper into the website with a much more detailed URL, such as http://www.getstuffforless.net/watches/designer/gold.

This economic compensation model should allow three things: 1. 3^rd party marketing bases their compensation on browsing info. 2. Users will allow this. 3. Fair and secure compensation. However, cheaters, who may use strategic browsing to increase personal revenues, in the user end should be considered. One way to deal with this is by setting a monthly or daily compensation limit. Anomaly detection technologies can also be used for this concern.

Advertising was once a simple method dominated by huge and established companies. Media-buying and advertising agencies create print or TV ads and negotiate for space or airtime in TV or publications. However, digital advertising has brought home a new arena for advertising which is a lot more complicated, with more players and firms involved. This is the summary of an article written by Emily Steel, which looks at the history of online advertising and its unique characteristics. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Advertising’s Brave New World

While color TV was the largest advertisement innovation during the last 70 years, new firms are coming up to make ads for the Internet. There are internet sites for TV, magazines, etc, but majority of the internet is dominated by companies including Google and Yahoo. Internet marketing industry has grown a lot over the past few years, and has a considerable slice on the overall US advertising market. To capitalize on this, large companies, both from traditional advertising companies and online companies, bought or struck deals with major digital-ad companies.

Online advertising is precise

Online advertising is attractive because of its precision. At most, television ads are evaluated using a rough approximation before they are shown to a targeted audience. Criteria could for example be based on attributes such as gender; TV shows with mostly female audience are sent ads of products for females, or as the result of surveys. Most of the time, advertisers are never quite sure if their ads were successful in increasing sales. Online advertising, on the other hand, use the services of behavioral targeting companies such as Tacoda, to create targeted ads based on a consumer’s browsing habits. For example, if a person visits two car websites and then visits an unrelated site later, a car ad will appear on that site. The person will most likely respond to the website as can be seen by his previous browsing behavior.

Paid search

The most popular online advertising method, paid search, only requires advertisers to pay when a consumer clicks their ads. With this method, Yahoo and Google are the most popular, because they attract small businesses that can’t afford ad agencies. Furthermore, firms have helped these businesses make their own websites and apply search engine optimization so that these websites will show up at the top of the results lists on these search engines.

Other players in online advertising

More characters dominate other types of online advertising. Digital agencies design display ads and send them to websites through technology-motivated companies. A typical company buys ad space on a number of sites, lining up all that space with the help of ad networks such as AOL and Real Media. Ad-serving firms, such as DoubleClick and Atlas, also play a role; they deliver the online ads to the websites. Online advertising players also evaluate campaign effectiveness. Traditionally, this is done by audience surveys, but this is not as effective as what digital advertisers use. They use metrics based on number of ad clicks, time spent on ad, and what consumer does after seeing the ad. If something isn’t working, a simple click can help improve the process. This way, a lot of information is obtained regarding where advertisers put their money online.

The internet has become a major avenue for advertising, toppling down other traditional media such as TV and newspapers. Newspaper ads, in particular, have shown significant drops in annual revenues over the years because of competition from internet advertising. According to many, the unique feature of the internet is its ability to give out information to a targeted audience. This is the summary of the paper by Dirk Bergemann and Alessandro Bonatti, and it is all about investigating the role of targeting in ad allocation across different media, and the equilibrium price for advertising. You can get the PDF of the behavioral targeting article here: Targeting in Ad Markets

A model to compare old and new media

This study aims to create a model which compares the new and traditional media. The model created in this study is one that involves a lot of markets (media) and products (advertisers), and a variety of buyers distributed across the media markets. The changes in targeting technology are systematically analyzed, and advertising and product markets of various sizes are ranked using a hierarchical structure. Particularly, the tension between value extraction and competition is being investigated. This tension is investigated extensively because it is believed that this is the main issue regarding the continuing improvement of targeting among all media involved.

Value Extraction

In the first part of this study, it was assumed that the consumers are distributed across all advertising markets through an exponential distribution. As the distribution gets bigger, a match between advertising and consumer increases, and as a result, social welfare increases because advertisers have a higher chance of reaching the kind of audience they want. At first, one would think that this implies that the equilibrium advertising prices will improve as well. However, this study shows otherwise, because another factor interplayed. This factor is a weaker competition as the concentration of consumers increased. What this weak competition does is that it lets advertisers focus on a few markets and neglect the other markets. The advertising value may have increased, but the advertising price has declined because of this.

Competition

The second part of this study discusses the competition for consumer attention among advertising markets. In this model, an advertiser can use two different media to send his/her message to a consumer. Competition between two offline media and an offline vs online media is then investigated. For the first scenario, it has been shown that the equilibrium prices of the two media are equalized, and advertisements are assigned on different media based on the total supply. On the other hand, competition between online and offline media is more complicated, because each of the two media must compete for every advertiser. This study finds that because of online media’s advertising capabilities such as attribute and behavioral targeting, competition with offline media will lower the latter’s price of advertisement, but even more so, for large capacity online medium, it will lower the offline media revenue more than a competition with another offline medium would.

What are Targeting Strategies?

Targeting strategies are generally used in terms of advertising as ways to maximize sales profits by directing marketing projects directly at the most likely consumer base. There are several different targeting strategies but the basic goal of each remains the same, to identify the target market or audience who is most likely going to be interested in buying your product so that you reach the people who will make a purchase. In general, the aim is to spend money reaching only consumers who want your services instead of a wide audience out of which only a few people may be interested in your services or products.

Different Kinds of Targeting Strategies

Along these lines, some of the most popular and frequently used targeting strategies are consumer marketing strategy, behavioral targeting, contextual targeting, and segment marketing. The common link of most of these targeting strategies is based around identifying the needs of your target audience and tailoring your marketing efforts so that you meet their needs and wants. Of course, in order for any of these strategies to work to their best they also require the proper consumer research to identify who your target audience is.

Offline Targeting Strategy

A popular offline targeting strategy is to create a brand name and style that carries a stigma that your target audience can identify with. For example, back in the nineties when the economy was still healthy Abercrombie and Fitch marketing affluence and exclusivity at middle class society and as a result created a clothing label out of thin air that was the requirement for all teens and college kids. Their success did not happen overnight as they participated in wide consumer research strategies throughout their period of success to provide what they deemed their audience wanted.

Advertise to your Target Audience!

For an online business, targeting strategies include consumer research that focuses on the willingness of their target audience to spend versus the relative need they have for a product. It also focuses on the consumer behavioral habits of consumers which are roughly defined as browsing habits. Then, the real trick is placing marketing advertisements in an area where the target audience surfs that is directed at the research that defines what will make them bite. While it is a twofold process, the payout is that most browsers will take the chance to look at the product offering and maybe purchase versus a wide scale marketing effort that only succeeds in a few people taking a glance.