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Ever wondered how to implement behavioral progressive profiling throughout your potential customers' awareness journey so you can drive demand generation?

In a "perfect" world, your ideal customer would read one blog post, see one ad or landing page, and immediately click the Buy Now button.

Unfortunately, that's not how modern marketing works—or how most prospects behave.

Most marketers are in the business of building trust and nurturing relationships with potential customers—because it takes time for most people to be ready to buy.

We know that around 70% of the buying decision is made before potential buyers get in touch with a company. And as potential customers move along the awareness journey, we need to collect information from them at each stage to inform and nurture them as necessary.

That approach allows us to service potential customers in the way they need, but it also helps us learn more about them, ensuring we can inform Sales when a lead is Sales qualified and ready to speak to us about buying.

This article will explore what behavioral progressive profiling is and how it differs from what marketing automation companies want you to think progressive profiling is.

Progressive Profiling vs. Behavioral Progressive Profiling: What's the Difference?

Let's address the elephant in the room before we continue.

The information surrounding progressive profiling from most marketing automation platforms is a little too simplistic and shallow.

Those platforms describe progressive profiling as the act of progressively collecting more contact information through a series of web forms.

That's not wrong!

But it's also not enough.

To understand the human motivations behind the purchase, and use those motivations to our advantage, we need to go deeper.

 

It's not enough just to collect contact information at a handful of points in the purchase cycle. Instead, we need to work to understand behavior and use that understanding to inform where prospects are on the automation journey.

And that's why behavior-based progressive profiling is preferable to traditional progressive profiling.

Behavior helps us move potential customers from Marketing-qualified leads (MQL) to Sales-qualified seads (SQL), at which point they are primed to talk to the sales team and actually purchase.

Ultimately, marketing departments can use behavioral understanding to generate better leads.

To better understand how that works, let's look more closely at the differences between progressive profiling and behavioral progressive profiling,

What Is Progressive Profiling?

First, let's define progressive profiling in its most basic form:

Progressive profiling is a method of segmenting your audience based on information progressively collected from Web forms on your site.

What does that process look like in action?

Rather than getting prospects to fill out long, time-consuming forms, you can create dynamic forms that change based on what you already know about a particular lead. As a result, every time you get an MQL to fill out a form, you progressively learn a little more about that lead.

For example, you might ask for an email and name in the first form (you should always be doing this...). Then, as your prospect moves through the customer journey, you can request progressively more data based on their awareness and readiness to buy.

This method allows you to learn more relevant and valuable information with each form. Moreover, it also keeps the forms short and easy to fill in.

Asking for three pieces of information vs. six pieces of information increased conversion by 10%, OptinMonster found.

Progressive profiling reduces overwhelm and allows you to guide prospects through to SQL based on how someone is interacting with your site.

>> Related content: Progressive profiling: behavioral segmentation from customer behavior

What Is the Problem With Traditional Progressive Profiling?

Progressive profiling in the form that most marketing automation platforms promote is, simply put, shallow. It doesn't give us a deep enough understanding of exactly where the customer is in the awareness journey.

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Using Behavioral Progressive Profiling to Drive Demand Generation

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Kenda Macdonald

Kenda Macdonald is a forensic psychology major, the Demand Generation Consulting Practice Lead at MarketingProfs, and the founder of Automation Ninjas, the UK's leading behavioral automation agency. She's an international public speaker, a multi-award-winning businesswoman, a doting cat mom, and the author of the best-selling Hack the Buyer Brain.