In a time where everyone is online, social media marketing is one of the most efficient ways to reach your audience. Knowing your audience is a vital step in running a great marketing campaign. This involves collecting information regarding your best customer’s age, gender, education, their language and location, their relationship status, their motivators, and their likes and dislikes. This data is better known as first-party data. Collecting this data gives you an upper hand in serving your audience better and helps weed out fake profiles.

Putting Your Ad Money to Good Use 

First-party data is an asset that can help maximize a company’s marketing efforts. A company can also learn more about its most valuable customers and monetize on it by making the right decisions. Here are some strategies that can help a company strategize its efforts better:

• People spend more time on social media platforms than any other websites. Companies must find out the platforms their target audience prefers and concentrate their efforts on those platforms.
• Companies must speak the language of the target audience by extracting their needs from the first-party data and molding their offerings accordingly.
• Narrowing down one’s target audience truly helps deliver to the most precise group of customers possible. Most social media platforms offer services to reach your best customers.
• Videos help engage audiences much faster than other mediums. Companies should invest money to producing high-quality video content to captivate their audience.
• Marketers should identify and seek help from top influencers among their target audience, such as actors, comedians, and YouTube and Instagram stars, to build better marketing campaigns.
• Brands need to make sure that their content has the potential to go viral. Shareable content provides higher return on investment and expands a brand’s reach.

Microtargeting: The New Marketing Trend

Microtargeting involves using a customer database to personalize marketing efforts to an individual level. Along with big data and social marketing platforms, microtargeting is accomplished by using AI, analytics, and behavioral modeling or psychographic profiling. This approach works in both B2C and B2B markets. In both cases, the ability to capture niche markets gives a company an upper hand over its competitors as people appreciate content that is relevant. Data-based tactics such as this can ensure better responses from the consumers. Political campaigns use microtargeting to make sure that the right information reaches their voters. 

Problems in Social Media Targeting

With most companies adopting targeting strategies, people have been questioning the morality of online targeting. The practice of targeting is most certainly moral unless the company is using the technique to engage in unlawful marketing practices. 

Online privacy has been another concern of social media users in the recent times. In order to protect the personal privacy of people, America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now requires Internet-service providers to ask customers for permission if they want to gather and share data that is deemed to be sensitive.

The ethics of social media targeting has been a topic of debate for a while now, but companies still believe that it is a reliable tool to reach out to the right audience.

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