This is part four in a four-part series on audience targeting – read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 here!
The Future of Audience is Social
In the prior articles in this series, we’ve talked about the basic techniques and strategies for reaching consumers in various points of the purchase funnel and driving them to the next stage. Technology makes all of this easier, of course, but in many ways seems to have built on to established offline practices. Sure, it’s made them more granular, easier and cheaper to scale, and certainly easier to measure accurately, but isn’t there anything that’s going to break the mold?
The answer is yes, and it’s called social. Social is the new marketing strategy, intrinsic to digital, which is going to change everything in the next few years. You can see the potential just bursting at the seams in companies big and small, like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and more. These companies sit on massive amounts of consumer data, what they search for, how people define themselves, what their social circles look like, and how they interact and respond within these social groups. These platforms are already all at scale, with big registered user bases, a rabid, high frequency fan base. It’s an incredible asset just waiting to be activated.
What is Social Data?
Think of social targeting as a way to model likely customers from existing customers based on who is in their social circle. The idea is that if you buy a certain kind of product, are in market for a certain product, or prefer one brand over another, everyone in your social group is more likely to follow suit. Not only that, but that because you’re already a trusted connection within your social group, you have the power to influence purchase decisions within that group. In a sense, it’s like harnessing and activating the power of word of mouth advertising, but driven from the advertiser side instead of consumer side.
Targeting Media with Social Data
Of all the solutions out there, Facebook offers the most sophisticated social ad products – once advertisers get users to take action, for example, clicking the “Like” button on an ad or a brand page, they immediate gain access to that person’s social connections. If you’ve ever wondered why brands push you to “like” them on Facebook, that’s why – they need your likes to scale their campaigns to you and your friends. Advertisers can even reach connections and friends of their fans who aren’t already fans themselves, and layer the same kind of demographic, interest, and behavioral elements that they might otherwise use for a regular ad campaign. It also allows brands to push messages into a user’s wall, so you can imagine the intense drive to acquire fans.
In stream messaging for wall posts is also part of the ad solution suite at Twitter, where marketers can buy promoted tweets to try and start viral campaigns, or promote branded hashtags to insert themselves into the ongoing conversation. This can backfire though, as users have at times hijacked ad campaigns, sharing negative experiences about the brand or mocking the campaign itself. Twitter also enables users to target these promoted messages to their followers, as well as followers of followers, much like Facebook’s connections model.
In addition to targeting options, social platforms offer new and exciting analytics and insights, allowing marketers a veritable gold mine for psychographic intelligence. For example, Twitter enables advertisers to understand who else their followers follow, where they tend to live, and much more. The opportunity to learn and deploy insights, with granularity, yet at scale and in real time has never been greater, and this is just on the two largest platforms that exist today, to say nothing of the scores of up and coming companies like Pinterest, Foursquare, and others. It’s the dawn of a new age!
But do Consumers Want to Be Your Friend?
As thrilling as the idea of social advertising is to marketers, users of social platforms aren’t nearly as enthusiastic about the idea. No matter how good it sounds, social data faces a number of key challenges, the first of which is privacy. Facebook seems to revise their privacy policy every few months at this point, releasing ad products and then backtracking during the inevitable outcry from their user base. While the youngest generations might feel more comfortable with their data out in the open, the majority of the population still seems outraged over the concept.
Outside of privacy, there’s still the issue of access – for now, each one of these companies makes very little of this consumer data available to advertisers who want it. It’s true that you can buy some sort of ad products on most of these platforms, but those products scratch the surface at best, limit the data to the walled gardens of each platform, and discourages creative use of the assets.
It’s as if each social media company discovered an ocean of oil under the ground they own, but with no idea how to extract it.