Digital Body Language: What It Means And How It Can Improve Your Marketing.
We take a look at Digital Body Language, and how it can improve your marketing efforts.
What is Digital Body language?
Digital Body Language is the combination of an individual’s online behaviour. Through subconscious and conscious actions – communicating these nonverbally through spending time on a certain website or communicating with the website’s Virtual Assistant (VI), for example, a Live Chat.
Business Intelligence (BI) systems can also help collect this data on an individual and tell you how often they have visited your site, which pages, the content and media they viewed and even how they engaged with your social media accounts!
In the 2010 “Digital Body Language” book, Steven Woods explains how buyers are now rewriting the rules! Buyers now control the pace, direction and timing of their own purchase – now marketers must decode a user’s digital body language to understand what stage of the buying process they are at. He discusses how to communicate with your visitors, when to communicate and what channels you should use.
Why It Matters
Sales people are rapidly losing the ability to read buyers behaviours through their physical body language because of the growth in online sales, less customers are buying in-store, making it harder to close a sale, as you’re not able to change your tone of voice, messaging and approach to selling. Actions have been replaced by data, and lots of it. This is where marketing is becoming increasingly more important to the sale of your products and services.
New technologies like marketing automation allow for in-depth, online tracking of customer behaviours. This software tracks user’s digital body language, giving businesses data that can support and inform of buying behaviours, in turn you can tailor marketing around this, increasing the chance of sale.
Understanding digital body language allows you to analyse audience behaviours and use artificial intelligence software to push them down the sales funnel faster than ever before. Read your audience’s digital body language incorrectly and your marketing risks being seen as ‘annoying’, but by reading and reacting you can in turn reduce opt-outs, unfollows and gain interest in your product by giving your audience the information they need, when they need it. Insight tools, such as Hubspot, allow you to use marketing automation solutions that saves you time and allows you to nurture every single one of your prospects.
Technological Advancements
New technological advancements, like Artificial Intelligence (AI) can take the data that you have captured and turn it into relevant marketing or sales techniques. Using the data collected it allows you to tailor everything to the individual. It’s all about timing, if you catch your audience at the right time, a sale is more likely. The more personal, the better – ensuring their experience with your business is all about them – rather than your wider target audience – will build your brand reputation and chance of a conversion.
- You can now discover where leads are coming from – find out which channels are working, and which are not, divide budget accordingly and also determine their motives – was the sale incentivised by an offer, an interesting blog post or for a specific product/service?
- Scroll hijacking is becoming increasingly more popular – by manipulating your scroll bar to behave in a different way, perhaps with animations, fixed scroll points or even a redesign, you can guide users to act a certain way on your website.
- Finding out amount of email clicks and opens – this is a high indication of how interested your audience is in the product/service or how engaged they are with your business. When they open, click or opt out can show you which emails are working, what a customer’s pain points are, and what they are most interested in.
- Automation emails – using Artificial Intelligence, you can tailor emails specifically around what an individual has been looking at, how close they are to purchasing and their previous history with the business. Email automation can save you time, by sending out emails automatically when a user acts in a certain way.
- The number of website visits – by finding out how often each user visits your website, you can work out their intentions. You can also create automated email and remarketing campaigns from the results.
- Discover which of your pages are most viewed – this highlights the pages of most interest to your audience and you can see how close a prospect is to the point of sale.
- Which forms have been filled out – both the quantity and type of form. This will show you what people are specifically looking for, the information gained, and can give you a good icebreaker for start of conversation. For example, “I see you enquired about XXX, how can I help?”
- Find out what your audience is searching for on Google – from this, you can create remarketing adverts, give each prospect recommended products and view again pages.
- Referrals from Social Media – you can identify where your visitors have come from, therefore where you can re-target them to visit again.
- For businesses using webinars, you can see who have attended – find out how interested and engaged they were, how long they stayed for, whether they contacted you after attending.
Types Of Digital Body Language
There are different levels of Digital Body Language. The general, broader, overall picture of a user’s digital body language will show you how users found your website, the frequency of their visits and the specific pages they visit. These allow you to see which of your marketing campaigns are working, which of your content is of most interest, how close they are to sale and most importantly, how you can improve your website.
Real-time body language is a much deeper analysis of a user’s mood or buying stage. Micro actions of your users allow you to react in ‘real-time’, just like you would face to face! Some examples of this are the pace of a user’s mouse, how fast they click and how they scroll through your page. Although these are as small as a simple yawn or sigh, they are important to understand so you can react accordingly.
Reading real-time cues show you that with every act of physical body language, there is equivalent digital body language. It’s all well and good collecting data, but you have to understand what it means and how your audience is feeling at that moment to be able to react accordingly. Clicking quickly could suggest confusion, perhaps your user is frustrated they cannot find what they are looking for. If your user is following the text with their mouse, they could be engaged with the content on your website. Spending longer on site could indicate leisurely browsing, no stress, they might not be ready to buy just yet. Fast and sporadic scrolling could indicate your user is searching for something specifically and not finding it, in a rush and need help to source information.
Once you understand what your audience is thinking, it allows your business to react with a real-time response, giving the customer a clever and rewarding experience. Responses can range from changes in call to actions, pop-ups, banners and tailored related content. Live chat is also a useful tool to have, your digital body language gives a good ice breaker and conversation starter, reacting to what a customer is telling you by what they are looking at and how they are reacting to your content. For example, if your visitor is rapidly scrolling trying to find a specific product, your live chat could kick in and ask if they need help finding a product.
7 Reasons To Use Digital Body Language
There are many different reasons for discovering and understanding your audience’s Digital Body Language. We have listed our top 8 below:
- Gain the full power of ‘big data’ – there is so much lost data that is left unused. Take advantage of what is available to you.
- There is more than just Google Analytics – extensive tools and data that is far more in depth.
- It allows to ‘individualise’ each user specifically, everyone is different with different needs that you can tailor to accordingly.
- You can value each visitor – understand their needs and how you can help them. This will improve conversion rate as you are giving them information they want and need.
- Integrated software allows you to gain information and market across a variety of platforms – know where your audience is and where you can target them.
- No more miss-messaging, only serve messages that are relevant to a user’s buying stage.
- Constantly improve your service– new strategies, more data, give your audience the information that they want.
As more and more people migrate online as opposed to purchasing products in a shop, it is becoming increasingly more important to understand what our users are telling us, because you can bet if you’re not reacting with real time intelligence, your competitors are.