Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences At Scale

2Where Are You on the Behavioral Marketing Spectrum?

If every great journey begins with the first step, then reorienting your marketing thinking around behavioral marketing could be the most important step in the whole process. Many of us are actually behavioral-driven marketers without even realizing it. We naturally select our best customers to receive the best discounts, and we gravitate to retention marketing without having all the metrics in place to prove it's the smarter way to go. By gut feel, I'd suggest that most critical-thinking marketers actually factor for customer behaviors without even knowing they're doing it.

But this chapter doesn't focus on what happens by coincidence or by mistake. Rather, it will provide a series of very clear litmus tests to help you figure out where you are today, what your potential looks like, whether you have the needed technologies, and how complex of a path you'll need to chart to get there.

Defining Your Now

Of all the steps in this—or any—transformation, the first is typically the hardest. That's not because the task is so monumental; it's because you need to break out of a previous way of thinking, regardless of how successful your trusted approach has been. It also takes time and some serious consideration to decide to replace your lens on the world, which is an analogy I don't use flippantly. In order to drive meaningful, long-lasting, epic change in your marketing, you absolutely must change your fundamental outlook. The burning ...