Mastering media targeting in The Age of Social

If you’re running a chain of hair salons in the United States, does your Instagram account need U.K. followers? If your business is primarily in B2B rubber pellet recycling, do you need to reach out to consumers? In the early years of the Age of Social, many companies were doing whatever they could to reach out to as many potential customers as possible. Now, many are realizing that what they really need is quality (and importantly, relevance) over quantity. They need to target the right audience.

How to reach your true target audience

Today, a popular method of discovering a target audience is to use “look-a-like” audiences. What does that mean? Essentially, you take your current customer base or list of leads and find other people who share similar characteristics (location, age, gender, interests, etc.). Facebook’s Audience Insights tool is a great way to do this, and there are also additional ways to use Google Ads or Twitter demographics.

But is that all that’s possible? What does the current world of hyper-targeted and mega-relevant marketing look like?

Creating content hyper-relevant to your target audience

1. Do your research and know what’s possible

Once you’ve discovered and built your target audience, it’s important to create content that resonates with them. This content must be relevant, interesting, and useful if you want people to engage with it. For example, if you’re targeting parents with young children, you might create content about family-friendly activities in your area. But with a targeting strategy reinforced by a customer data platform, like Lytics, you targeting can be even smarter. Want to target only audiences who have made recurring purchases with your brand and visited your homepage in the past 6 months? With Lytics, you can — and it’s simple.

2. Media targeting and ROAS in the Age of Social

Another way to target your audience is by using paid ads. You can use Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, and Twitter Ads to specifically target people who are interested in what you have to offer. This type of advertising is great for businesses that want to reach a specific audience without having to create dedicated relevant content. But it’s going to become more challenging as it becomes more difficult to target ads, unless you’ve figured out a way to maximize your return on ad spend (ROAS).

Fostering a real human connection on social media

At the end of the day, social media is all about human connection. No matter how good your targeting is or how well-defined your personas are, you won’t be successful if you don’t take the time to build relationships with your followers. This means being responsive to comments and questions, sharing interesting and relevant content, and generally being engaging.

One-on-one communications, responding to followers, and reacting to what your followers are doing and thinking about are a few ways that you can foster true human connections through your social media. Many people are tired of advertising and can identify it right away, so engaging in the most relevant ways to the right audiences and at the right time is crucial to successful brand-customer relationships.

The pitfalls of social media marketing in a social world

As with anything in life, there are also pitfalls to social media marketing. The most significant is likely trying to do too much at once. It’s important to target your audience and create content that resonates with them, rather than trying to be all things to all people. Focusing on quality over quantity is essential. You don’t need to post eighteen tweets a day or send out twenty posts on LinkedIn. Your time might be better spent waiting for the perfect moment, or building audiences in a smarter way.

Think from the audience’s perspective. Are you giving something to them? Are you solving their problems? Or are you just making their life more frustrating with your marketing materials?

At the end of the day, marketing is actually about building human connections. Ideally, you have something that someone else wants. You need to educate them about the benefits of your solution. While marketing strategies may come and go, real personal relationships that you have built with your customers won’t. And that can come very easily with the right targeting in something as simple as a social media campaign.

Building personalized experiences on social with Lytics

As a customer data platform designed to prioritize and leverage first-party data, Lytics help you collect and use the right data to gain the insights you need to create a unique, relevant, and compelling experience for your customers. Try Lytics for free and take your customer data-centric targeting strategy to the next level.