Mediaplex's senior director of product management outlines six steps to foolproof targeting.

Behavioral marketing continues to expand rapidly, and with good reason. The consistently strong results that early practitioners have realized are encouraging more marketers to begin testing. But as exciting as this approach is, it bears reviewing the fundamental considerations that are critical to planning any media campaign, along with the adjustments to be made for a behavioral marketing campaign.

1. Research: Before embarking on a behavioral marketing program, you should analyze past consumer behavior to understand the steps in the consideration and conversion cycle, establish objectives and define benchmark measurements.
   
2. Segment identification: The insights from the research phase are used to identify distinct audience segments you will be targeting. While traditional targeting is based on geography, age, income, gender, etc., behavioral marketing has special considerations depending on if you're using Active or Passive approaches, or both. For instance, in active behavioral marketing you may want to give consideration to recency of interaction, frequency of interaction, depth of interaction (progress along the purchase cycle), etc. In passive behavioral marketing you may focus on how high an individual scores against the ideal customer profile. However, the most important rule here is simplicity. This is important for both program management and budgetary reasons.

• Program management: At the outset, there will be enough new information to digest that additional levels of complexity unnecessarily complicate the program.
• Budgetary: The more targeted the inventory, the more expensive and scarce it is. In addition, the more detailed your segmentation plan looks the more creative messages you will need. Both of these points inflate budgets. 

3. Objectives and measurement: Although setting objectives may seem rudimentary, it's not uncommon to see programs that are started without formal objectives documented. This should be one of the first steps for any campaign, whether or not it includes behavioral marketing. Your objectives should be detailed, measurable and attainable. For example, your objective may be to increase site visits, site registrations, purchases, etc. All of these are valid and should be accompanied by a specific goal metric. Finally, make sure benchmark data and measurement systems are in place that will accurately record progress against those objectives.

4. Offer and creative: Now that you've defined your segments and established your objectives and goals, it's time to consider the offer and creative. With behavioral marketing you are afforded the opportunity to tailor the offer and creative by segment. For each of your segments you should define one or more offers to test that are highly-relevant to that group, and creative that addresses them in a persuasive way.

As with segmentation, you should start out with basic message differentiation so as not to overcomplicate the program. Recommendations for relatively easy but effective strategies for versioned messages in starting programs include:

• Current customer vs. prospect
• First-time vs. repeat visitor to your website
• Non-buyers vs. previous purchasers

5. Media planning and buying: Where will this program be deployed, on your own website, in a media buy, in your email program or a combination of them? If being deployed outside your own site, which media property(ies) provides the reach, frequency, creative flexibility, pricing, etc. to accommodate the plan? A key benefit of behavioral marketing is that it liberates you from preconceived notions of where your buy should be placed since you are now targeting individuals rather than content (specific sites, placements, etc.). These individuals appear on many sites, providing you with a great opportunity to get in front of a smaller, more qualified universe more frequently. In keeping with the "start simple" recommendation, a suggestion is to work with few properties -- sites or networks -- at first. Also, you should consider using a third-party ad server in order to establish consistency baseline performance benchmarks across your plan.

6. Technology and data: Ensure that the technology used to configure your program can address the specifics of your plan. The quickest route to a fast launch is to leverage the behavioral marketing capabilities of the organization responsible for managing your conversion tracking tags, such as your third-party ad server or web analytics firm. 

In the rush to take advantage of this powerful approach, it's easy to disregard the fundamentals. But a poorly-planned behavioral marketing program wastes budget and gives a bad name to an approach that could have been extremely effective for your organization if it had been planned properly.  

Sean Quick is senior director of product management for Mediaplex, a leading provider of interactive marketing technologies. Read full bio.