Ask your favorite behavioral marketing rep what content areas and actions on his or her site or network indicate interest in your product. For instance, if you sell riding mowers, searches for "mower" might represent a potential customer early in the consideration process. Visits to specific model pages might indicate someone who has moved down the funnel considerably.

Your task is to organize all the behaviors that indicate stages of consideration into buckets so that appropriate messages can be served to prospects at the appropriate time. For instance, you might deliver a category sales message to the guy who searched for "mower," getting him to consider a riding mower over a push mower. Perhaps the tagline might be something like "Mow your lawn 60 percent faster." Later, when that same prospect shows up at a review site, you might want to serve up a message that indicates customer satisfaction or quality. When he starts pricing out models, it's time for the "discount for first time customers" message.

See what we've done here? We've identified behavior that corresponds to three distinct phases of the consideration funnel for riding mowers. And as a prospect has displayed those behaviors, we've served up a message that is best suited for moving that prospect a stage or two down the funnel.

You might also base your messaging on timing. Behavioral marketing companies usually employ recency algorithms so that you don't waste your time advertising to people who have already made their purchase and moved on. After all, it wouldn't make sense to send someone an ad for a minivan if they were observed looking at minivan reviews 12 months ago, right?

You can use recency and some assumptions not only to eliminate waste but also to target prospects as they move down the funnel. If your research on your own category indicates that most prospects move from consideration to purchase within 30 days, you may want to serve a late-stage message to someone who indicated they were entering the category 21 days ago. You may not be able to precisely predict where someone is within the process, but it beats serving up a message that is designed to get someone to choose a minivan over an SUV if they've already made that decision.

Speaking of predictions, our next tactic involves using them to identify new entrants into your category.