Behavioral Marketing: Delivering Personalized Experiences At Scale

4Pacing YourselfBehavioral Marketing at the Speed of Business

I've been a digital marketer for more than 20 years, and I know how difficult it can be to move to new paradigms. I remember the first days of banner advertising, when we overpaid for cost-per-thousand impressions (CPMs) and tracked them in Excel spreadsheets. We had no idea if any of those clicks amounted to anything close to conversion, but we were out there trying. Eventually those tools would be powered by DoubleClick, which Google purchased, and AdWords as we know it today was born.

There's a similar movement taking place right now in the behavioral marketing space. Lots of brands are aggressively experimenting with this newish technology, and most show strong results. Being more relevant and personalized across your marketing programs is almost always a good thing—and drives more revenue virtually every time out.

Unlike the AdWords example, I don't believe a single company will consolidate the industry with a genius mergers and acquisitions (M&A) move. Instead, becoming a great behavioral marketer requires looking inward at your efforts and business, rather than standardizing a set of tasks on an external platform. We'll all be evaluating our marketing stack to make sure it gets us to our destination—but I'm pretty sure we're not all going to migrate our tech to a single company's service. If you agree, you'll certainly want to make sure that your tech selections support an open integrated ecosystem.

And because ...