How to Use Social Data for Targeted Marketing?

There’s no escaping the Digital world, which means we are reliable on, amongst other things, emails, social media and mobile apps. Life online allows us to do many things more easily, be it selling, buying, interacting or research. Having an online presence allows for greater exposure for businesses across the world to showcase their products and services. However, in order to promote your company’s existence, and to create a positive impression of your brand identity, you need an effective online marketing strategy. Here, social media can play a crucial role. But how can you use social data for targeted marketing? • Event targeting In July, 2015, Twitter declared a new marketing tool for marketers, known as ‘Event Targeting.’ The integrated event calendar helps you to look for concerts, trade shows, holidays and more. Moreover, it gives you an ability to find out audience insights related to an event’s followers, and create a campaign to target them once the chosen event is live. This has helped some companies increase engagement by around 38%. • Identify industry related topics and trends Again using Twitter as an example, to identify current trends and topics, you can use Twitter Advanced Research and Twitter Moments. If you are seeking a way to identify interests within a smaller group of specific customers, use the Tailored Audiences analysis feature. Here, you can also upload lists of Mobile advertising IDs, Twitter handles, or email addresses. This is the Twitter equivalent of Google’s Remarketing campaigns, whereby a user has already had some level of interaction or exposure to your brand, and you then get the opportunity to reach out to them once more. • Targeted and personalised emails Personalisation is a marketing strategy whereby you have been able to identify a person’s relevant attributes, such as interests, behavior, and intent. You can customise your emails to present only the content and calls to action that are relevant to that individual. Social data has a good deal of influence when using targeted marketing as a strategy. When executing, the real key here is being customer focused when adopting a data driven marketing campaign.