Pursuing The Right Target Audience On Social Media

You probably think you already know who your target audience on social media is. But, are your campaigns aimed at anyone and everyone? Are they the same audience you’ve been targeting for years? Not necessarily.

In the past few years, social media’s popularity has grown immensely. With 1 billion plus smart phones in the world, 3G /4G / Wi-Fi, number of social media participants has been on a constant rise. This digital bang has attracted companies and brands to adopt social media audience marketing in order to achieve the desired company goals and target their potential consumers. To tap this opportunity, companies make incessant effort to take the benefit of the widespread reach of social media sites for consumer engagement and impact business. The only challenge is that social media is a very dynamic medium and requires a very cautious and strategic approach. Choosing the right platform for the right audiences is the key.

The digital marketing industry is at a cusp of paradigm shift. The old rules of digital marketing are giving way to the new set of more data driven, real time marketing decisions. At the center of this transition is an ever evolving, time starved and multifaceted consumer. More and more consumers are in an ‘always on’ mode on various digital devices like mobile, PCs and tablets at homes, on transit and at offices. They scourge the internet for the best deals, buys and review multiple products on e-commerce sites daily. They discover content through various sources like search, social recommendations and content curated sites.

While most companies understand the power of social media, they many times fail to implement an intelligent, fact-based marketing strategy based on audience study.

Most importantly, brand marketers need to answer some key questions:

Q.1)  What messages will resonate best with target audiences?

Q.2)  What offers will be most compelling?

Q.3)  Through which channels should the messages be delivered?

On an average a user is bombarded with thousands of messages on a daily basis via multiple platforms. In an extremely cluttered digital space, customer attention is difficult to achieve. Thus, marketing success depends on delivering relevant, well-timed and tailored marketing messages based on consumer behavior patterns.

Here are some platforms from where marketers obtain various types of information about various audiences and can target the right ones basis a thorough study:

• First-hand information from websites, social media, mails
• Shopping preferences from searches, e-commerce, retail sites
• Communication preferences from email and social media
• Purchasing behavior from point-of-sale

Different audiences are looking for different companies on different platforms, also it’s not simply about having accounts on different types of platforms. It is equally important to be active on these platforms and create an interesting audience engagement.

Today, the dynamic digital landscape and via technological advancements there are endless opportunities to advertise and engage with customers. It is also not surprising to note increasing spends on digital and mobile advertising by many brands. In fact, they spend bigger parts of their budgets targeting the digital world and yet they struggle given the inability to track audience behavior vis a vis bulk digital purchases. Many wonder if they are wasting money each month on online advertising that doesn’t really reach ideal prospects and often think what if every person who saw their ad online fit the perfect customer profile?

Therefore, regardless of the kind of business you run, it’s important to pay attention to people visiting your site or profile. It's imperative to have a fundamental grasp of your audience’s behavior and know who’s looking for the services or products you offer— and who you want to be following your business — varies from business to business and from website to website. Classification of customer into small sub-segments based on a combination of multiple digital activities they engage in provides higher level of confidence in demographics, behavior and intent analysis of their digital journey.

Managing and integrating data from a variety of sources is the top challenge preventing organizations from making use of customer analytics.

In this fast paced environment where millions and billions of digital engagement is taking place across thousands of touchpoints, the challenge to catch the right audience at the right place with the right marketing communication is paramount. Audience marketing and its various tools leveraging Big Data technologies to better understand and predict and connect the 5Ms – Millions of People with Millions of Devices, doing multiple activities, at multiple times, using multiple ways or methods is the Key for a brands marketing campaign success.

It’s all about how well and impactfully the brand is engaging and connecting with the audiences. It’s an era of dialogue creation, with integrated campaigns across platforms that are far more effective in delivering brand’s message than campaigns in silos. Ultimately, for any brand the Audience is the King!