Marketing has evolved from the last, least sophisticated department hired for start-ups into a profit centre, demonstrating measurable ROI and taking ownership over the sales cycle. We’re in an era of marketer-founders, of data-driven campaigns, and integrated marketing technology.

That means we all spend a lot of time thinking about the technology and analytics that helps us reach out to first-time and loyal customers, and those that help us measure our efforts. The real difference for today’s marketer is that we finally—finally—have behavioural technologies.

What is behavioural technology?

Behavioural technology tracks how users interact with content like web pages, ads, videos or webinars, and turns this into actionable data. They’re now commonplace; think of a blogging platform that tracks how long readers were engaged or a webinar platforms that records the questions visitors ask.

This data-driven insight provides two core benefits to marketers:
1. It helps us understand which content works and what doesn’t.
2. It allows us to build detailed profiles of our audience; what gets them excited, what leaves them cold and what’s likely to interest them the next time we reach out.

Getting to know engagement-driven content delivery

Behavioural tracking technology isn’t worth anything if we don’t have customers and prospects to track. One of the core objectives of any modern marketing department is to create moments where prospects can engage with your brand. With more moments of engagement—social shares, blogs, webinars—we have more data to analyse, which in turn gives us more value from our marketing investments.

That’s why interactive marketing channels like websites and webinars are so great: by their very nature, they offer the consumer an engaging environment. Brochures and billboards will always have their place, but, when it comes to content, engagement is king.

How tech integrations turn engagement into leads

Now that we have all these technologies that track behaviour, we have a whole new problem: how do we distil all that data into a single, clear picture?

Integration is the key. This is why we call it a “tech stack” and not “a pile of marketing software.” All these services need to work together; usually in conjunction with marketing automation and/or CRM software.

For example, at On24, we track the behavioural signals in a webinar and pass that on to our marketing automation platform, which triggers a relevant email send, then on to our CRM software, where a detailed contact record is created for the sales team. With a fully integrated marketing tech stack, the signals a prospect generates when they engage with your marketing, wherever they engage, resonate throughout the ecosystem.

Using behavioural cues to find your best leads

Marketing used to have a single goal: generate more leads. At the early stages of web marketing, we couldn’t differentiate effectively between quality leads and junk, creating cross-team frustration. No matter how many leads marketing generated, the sales department was starving for more.

Thanks to behavioural technologies, we’re finally shifting that conversation from “more leads” to “better leads.” Now that we can track engagements, we know that we’re only giving sales the leads that are most likely to convert. And, because those leads now come with a rich, detailed report showing all the ways the prospect has engaged with the brand—from which emails they opened to the links they clicked—our reps can have productive, meaningful conversations from first contact.

There’s no way to know what the future holds for marketing, but behavioural data will play a part. They’ve already made us better marketers, and by integrating behavioural technologies into our marketing tech stack, we’ll meet tomorrow’s challenges.

 

By Joe Hyland, CMO of ON24

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