• by Scott Brinker , August 3, 2009

What are your intentions?

Wait, wait. Let me guess. You're with an advertising agency, and you're keeping up on industry trends? No, a publisher, looking to increase revenue? Ah-ha, an analyst trying to figure out if behavioral targeting is the next boom?

Huh, you're actually searching for tips on talking to your future father-in-law about him becoming a grandfather before 40? (My tip: avail yourself of long-distance communications.)

If you clicked to read this article, I should know more about you than I do about a completely random stranger. I'm pretty safe assuming that you're interested in online marketing (98% certainty), and the odds that you are interested in behavioral targeting is probably better than 50/50. That's a great start, and I should engage you with that in mind.

But do I really know your intent?

Unless your mouse spastically jerked at the last second, you did click here intentionally. But like in most click-through scenarios -- primarily advertising -- I'd contend that you didn't reveal your intent, but merely your interest.

Interest versus intent is not a semantic nit-pick. If you lend any credence to the AIDAS (attention, interest, desire, action, satisfaction) model -- it's not perfect, but many successful marketing and sales programs have been built on it -- then you recognize that moving from interest to desire takes a little work. Sometimes it takes a lot of work.

To uncover intent, you really need a dialogue.

And this is where landing pages can take interest to the next level. While much of the discussion around behavioral targeting focuses on advertising, the real trick is observing the right behaviors to feed those algorithms. Possibly the best way to accomplish that is through the use of behavioral segmentation on landing pages.

With behavioral segmentation, you present respondents with a handful of simple, transparent choices -- two or three, no more than five -- to guide them to the content and offers most relevant to their interest. While this is framed from the perspective of helping respondents -- which it genuinely should -- it also provides the marketer with accurate signals of real intent.

For example, imagine this article was a landing page.

To do behavioral segmentation, when you first clicked to view this article, you would have actually landed on a pre-article page that could have given you three graphical, one-click choices: are you interested in behavioral targeting as (1) an agency, (2) an advertiser, or (3) a publisher? Maybe also a fourth choice, presented with less emphasis, for an "other" category.

You're incentivized to click on a choice because the implicit promise is that I'll give you the article you wanted, but presented in a way that is most relevant and helpful to you. (And I'd better live up to that promise.)

And now, based on your deliberate choice, I can converse with you in a way that's more productive for both of us.

These kind of mini-dialogues that are short and focused are a great way to move from interest to intent. And, when they're done right -- again, with the goals of the respondent in mind -- they can be highly effective.

Surprisingly, however, relatively few companies employ this technique today. It's not hard. It doesn't require any specialized software. All you need to do is pick the starting points -- your most promising search keywords or display advertising initiatives -- and connect them up with landing pages that evoke this type of directed interaction.

Behavioral marketing should be more about transparent dialogues, and less about guessing.

What are your landing pages telling you about your customers?