How to Turn Behavioral Data Into Actionable Insights

Almost 9 in 10 marketers say data is their company’s most underutilized asset. With the right metrics, you can build behavioral profiles of your audience that can enhance your entire sales cycle, helping steer marketing campaigns and hyper-relevant sales conversations. Let’s find out how:

When you’re having a conversation with someone in person, you’re aware of much more than the words they’re saying. In fact, many experts believe that there is a 55/38/7 formula for communication. It breaks down to 55% body language, 38% tone of voice, and 7% the actual words spoken. Eye contact, hand movements, posture - these are all signals that convey sentiment or intent.

In digital communications, these hidden messages are lost. Instead, we need to rely on certain data points to uncover what people are really trying to say.

A form submission is not necessarily an invitation to talk with a salesperson. We need to look at the customer journey and their engagements with our brand collectively to read through the lines and predict whether they’re actually willing or ready to be reached out to. In short: behavioral data is digital body language, quantified.

Behavioral data is information produced as a result of an action taken with your brand. There are two kinds:

These are explicit actions people take in regard to your marketing. Such as:

• Clicks
• Likes
• Downloads
• Opens

Alone, these actions don’t necessarily tell us much about a person. A click on an ad is redundant if we don’t know that the visitor actually stuck around on the landing page. They might have clicked it by accident or because they misunderstood the message. However, if we string multiple external metrics together to track that person’s journey, we’re more likely to understand their interests and see whether they’re actually the right fit for us.

Once you’ve tracked the initial engagement, much of the value from a behavioral perspective is in what they do once they’re ‘inside’, so to speak. Such as:

• Time spent reading
• Additional visits to the webpage or content
• How they navigate through the ad or content

Let’s say someone opens your whitepaper. All we know at this stage is that the title, description, or even the cover design was enough to hook them. The next stage is figuring out if the content of the whitepaper actually resonated with them. How long did they read it for? Which sections did they skim over quickly? What grabbed their attention?

“Only looking at external metrics is a bit like attempting to learn to play chess just by watching what’s going on without ever having read the rules,” explains Nick Mason, CEO and Founder of Turtl. “It’s going to be nearly impossible to play to a decent standard and there’s going to be a lot of guesswork, confusion, and unnecessary errors.”

You’re almost certainly tracking behavioral data already. The challenge is making sure that you have the right tools to collect enough sources of data to reveal entire journeys rather than brief, disconnected moments.

Standard analytics tools will give you a broad range of metrics showing general trends among your audience. But if you want to build a full behavioral profile for your leads and prospects, you need to be able to track individuals in detail. This is particularly valuable for [account-based strategies](account-based strategies).

Solutions exist that can help you with this. Influ2, the Person-Based Marketing platform, lets you approach decision-makers from your target companies and track their behaviors as buying groups. You will see the list of individuals as they engage with your ads, regardless of whether they’ve submitted a form. You can then use Influ2 analytics to follow their journey over time, allowing you to build personalized buyer journeys across the whole funnel.

Turtl, the content automation platform, allows you to create content that can be tracked at a granular level down to individual readers. You can see how long they’ve read each section of the content, which interactive widgets they engaged with, and even where and when they decided to share it with a friend or colleague. These insights reveal audience behaviors they may not be consciously aware of.

Once you’re armed with the right data, you need to think about what you’re going to do with it. Here’s how you can turn your analytics into action:

The best way to collate it all, keep it concise, and make it actionable is by combining all your data with centralized account scores. These account scores should indicate account readiness. The goal is to answer key questions: is this account engaged, in-market, and ready for outreach? You can create multiple scores across these different dimensions or a single score that combines all of your data sources: marketing data, firmographic data, content engagement metrics, and advertisement data to give a snapshot of where the account is at.

Influ2’s platform does this automatically, calculating a behavioral score based on ad and landing page engagement. It uncovers typically hidden insights, like how quickly someone clicked on an ad and how long they spent on the landing page. As the account readiness score increases, this will let your commercial teams know when an account is ready for outreach.

But how do they know how to act on it with the right content or message?

The next thing you need to do is let your sales team know how they should approach these accounts. To begin, create scenarios. What does a high intent account look like when you consider all your behavioral metrics and other data available? Generally, it looks like multiple decision-makers at an account engaging with your ads, emails, and website. These scenarios should factor into your scoring and trigger intent data tags so that everyone can easily access these insights and see exactly which behaviors led to this moment.

For example, let’s say you have an account that’s generated a high readiness score and was tagged with an intent signal: they've been engaging heavily with key sales content. Based on this data, this account is automatically added to a relevant advertising marketing campaign.

The same data triggers a notification to the sales team, including the right email sequence to put them in and the content to include. These automated processes ensure sales is aligned with marketing and that your behavioral data is being carried along the sales cycle, helping craft a unique brand experience at every stage of the buyer journey.