Behavioral Marketing Guide for Startups

This behavioral marketing guide equips startups with practical steps for employing behavior driven marketing strategy to boost startup growth and scale up. It highlights the importance of deeply understanding customer behavior using data analytics for tailored marketing strategy efforts. Focused on actionable insights, it details how startups can leverage startup marketing to enhance customer engagement and retention.

Foundations of Behavioral Marketing Strategy

● Know Your Customer (using empathy map and persona analysis): Persona, problem, need/challenge, solution.● User/Customer Journey (the path to goal achievement for each persona): Behavior, emotions, touchpoints, triggers, unmet needs.● Positioning Strategy: Through what unique resources and competencies is this problem solved? What is the main and unique value proposition of your product?● Target Audience: Which clients is the communication about the product aimed at in the next 3-6-12 months?● Brand Strategy: What, how, and to whom do we talk about the brand, product?● User/Customer Experience (how you will communicate and interact with each other, with the product): What role will you play in relation to your clients, and how to interact at each stage until the first payment? Which third parties are involved in the communication chain and how?● Communication Strategy: How we attract attention - channels, tools, messages; where we find clients and how much will it cost to talk to them?

Customer Development: Persona Analysis

● Persona Image: Name (invent), profession (specify as accurately as possible), age, personal information (place of birth, marital status, education, work experience, habits).● Interests: How does s/he spend his/her free time? What inspires him/her? What does s/he read, watch, listen to?● Needs: What does s/he need? What is missing – in life, in the family, at work?● Values: What is especially valuable to him/her? What are the moral values? What makes him/her happy, satisfied, loses mood? In what does s/he see the meaning of existence?● Strengths: What resources does s/he possesses? What/who can s/he influences? What actions can s/he take?● Behavior: What is the shopping schedule in his/her free time?● Aspirations: What kind of person would s/he like to be? Brands? Spending patterns? Dreams?

Customer Development: Empathy Map

● Problem Design: Who is affected by the problem? Why is it important for the user to solve it? How is the problem currently being solved? What will be the outcome if the problem remains unresolved? Where – in which area does the problem lie? What prevents the problem from being solved now? When should the problem be solved?● Solution Design: How could we help (which persona)? What could we do to ease the personas' scenarios, from which problem to get rid of?● What Says: What is the persona's opinion about the product/idea?● What Thinks: What are the team's assumptions about what the persona thinks about the product/idea (when using or seeing/hearing)? What made you make such an assumption?● What Does: What actions and behavioral peculiarities have you noticed?● What Feels: What emotions does the user express?

Product and marketing metrics

● Conversion metrics: channels, registrations, subscriptions, cost per click/per impression/per registration/per activation, user and customer acquisition cost, user and customer lifetime value, ads ROI, and channel efficiency.● Product engagement metrics: product activations, daily/weekly/monthly active users, engagement time, engaged sessions and time, user engagement score based on product/feature/button usage.● Product usefulness metrics: time on product/feature/button, product/feature/button usage frequency and goal met.● Product efficiency metrics: new/expert user time to complete a task, # of actions to complete a task, # of issues by task, # of failures by task.● Product learnability metrics: page entrance rates, page drop-off rates (for visitors), page exit rates (for users).● User retention metrics: 1/7/21/30/90/180 days retention and churn rates (after registration), subscribed/requested (users subscribed to notifications and enabled them out of all who were shown requests), opened/sent, stickiness (how many days in a row per period users use the product), renewal rate (paying customers renewed subscription).● Revenue metrics: average return per registration (ARPR), per user (ARPU), per account per year (ARPA), per paying user (ARPPU – without repeated payments), average check (per paying user including repeated payments), monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

Behavioral marketing automation components

Product and marketing analytics infrastructure:● Backend, GA4, and GTM event-based logs collection.● BigQuery logs database (or alternative).● Event-based metrics calculation.● Tableau real-time BI dashboards (or alternative).

Behavior driven acquisition, engagement, and retention tools: ● Transactional email re/marketing using Brevo (or alternative).● Chatbot and notification system using Brevo (or alternative).● Google Ads retargeting.● Social Media retargeting.

User and customer journey segments and steps:
● Visitors: New, returning, and hooked visitors.
● Users: Non-activated, activated, new-in-product, active, and passive users.
● Customers: Hooked, yet-to-complete-purchase, completed-purchase, and returning customers.

Behavior event-based triggers:● Conversion actions.● Website and product (app) actions and engagement: page and video views, scroll depth, time on page/in feature, button clicks, page/feature/button usage frequency.● Drop-off and exit page visits, and more.

Behavioral marketing automation guide Summary

1. Design User and Customer Journeys with touchpoints and communication mechanics (emails, notifications, chatbot, messages, ads) for personas defining behavior events (triggers).2. Describe analytic report requirements and basic product and marketing metrics for further calculation and visualisation.3. Set up on the backend, GA4, and GTM traction of audience segments, button clicks, page views, traffic channels, form submissions, conversions, and product interactions.4. Set up basic GA4 reports: audience distribution, growth dynamics, engagement trends (button clicks, page views, scrolls, form submissions, and video interactions), conversions, drop-out, and traffic channels.5. Clean up data: identify and fix data breaks, inconsistencies, and anomalies on the backend, GA4 and GTM.6. Design re/marketing (notification, chatbot, message, ads) communication strategies for acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and retention stages using behavioral events (triggers) for each journey step of personas.7. Set up missing event-based logs collection on the backend, GA4, and GTM.8. Set up Brevo (or alternative) re/marketing automation service and log synchronisation from the backend, GA4, and GTM.9. Design and set up email workflow automation for each communication strategy in Brevo (or alternative).10. Set up BigQuery (or alternative SQL database) and configure basic settings and data import from the backend, GA4, GTM, and Brevo.11. Set up event-based metrics calculation and configure basic analytic dashboards on Tableau (or alternative).