There was a time when marketers used a vague audience targeting approach. Broad age group categories and other imprecise data points fuelled hit-or-miss marketing campaigns. But social intelligence that provides fine-tuned data has become the key to successful digital marketing. Here’s why:
Dated audience personas such as ‘the millenial’ don’t say much about your audience. Consider that a ‘millenial’ is anyone born around the turn of the millenium (from the 1980s to the 2000s). The average ten-year-old has little in common (as far as consumer behaviour is concerned) with a thirty-something. Vague categorisations don’t cut it: You need data that helps you understand your audience’s values and motivations.
Social networks have given us the ability to collect these precision insights. Now that billions of people use social media globally, marketers are able to capture and analyse data that allows for extremely precise marketing (and re-marketing). Data from social media behaviour delivers insights into audiences’ current interests, life experiences, concerns and desires. This is powerful data.
Customers In Control: Why Relevancy Is King
Social media is a ‘me-first’ space, and the modern, self-focused consumer demands more. It’s not enough to reach out to customers with personalised content. Content also needs to be relevant to your audience’s pressing, current needs in a digital world where a competitor is a click, tap or swipe away. Intelligent social data can thus help you find what is relevant to your audience right now and place content or promotions while their intent is aligned with your product or service.
What Does Social Intelligence Offer? (Besides Helping You Stay Relevant)
Gathering social data intelligently will also help you understand customers better on a cognitive level. You’ll begin to gain true insight into how customers think and what overarching customer experience will create mutually beneficial connection.
With social insights, you can look beyond the old metrics (likes and clicks) and into the finer points of what drives a customer to make decisions that fuel your ROI. Social media data makes it easier to be precise in your targeting and create and scale successful marketing strategies.
It’s All About Building Unique Audience Profiles
The scores of data points that can be gathered from social media – what customers are sharing, talking about, anxious about, loving and hating – will help you build unique audience profiles. Intelligent customer data is quicker and cheaper to obtain now than ever (no more expensive focus groups and surveys). Integrating your social insights with customer behaviour data will give you information you can redirect into successful marketing campaigns.
If you want to harness social intelligence to boost your customer relationships and ROI, schedule a consultation with Interact today.