Just as you’d never consider not having a website, precision marketing is fast becoming a staple of digital marketing. Whereas brand marketing, with its highly creative and often costly concepts remains largely untargeted and too much of a ‘broad brushstroke’ approach to reaching into and influencing a target market. Precision marketing is one area of your communications strategy you won’t want to ignore.
Digital and social media marketing merely provide the ‘where’ for your marketing campaigns to occur. But it’s not enough to simply post to digital channels. Your posting has to be precisely calculated – targeted to the right audience, with the right message, at the right time – or it doesn’t stand much chance of engaging the consumers you hope to reach.
This often means you are stuck in a vacuum. The traditional ‘spray and pray’ approach of someone somewhere being influenced by your ‘campaign’ is really far too clumsy especially nowadays where ‘precision’ influence can be packaged in such a ‘user friendly’ way.
Now, thanks to how Facebook has come of age as a sophisticated marketing tool for business in the past 18 months, precision marketing has risen to prominence as a valuable tool in the overall marketing mix.
Facebook now delivers exceptional high-quality video adverts just like TV does, but these can be targeted with such detail precision at the exact primary audience you are looking to influence. This is done with pinpoint accuracy, using robust ‘back engine’ algorithms – all focusing in on what the individual’s social media ‘purchasing pattern’ is.
A precision marketing strategy
Deploying a precision marketing strategy on Facebook significantly reduces incidents of customer annoyance – look how many of us now use ad blocker software and opt outing of erroneous emails shows us how indifferent we are to repetitive and irrelevant advertisements, where there are innumerable privacy and tracking concerns, as advertisers attempt to capture our data by building what they term ‘super-cookie pools’, which increases public concern and anxiety over privacy.
This concern has been pivotal to the introduction of the forthcoming GDPR legislation, which will force companies to carefully manage the digital data that is captured and stored.
Of course, in this digital age, consumers have a myriad of options. They can – and do – easily disengage when brands offer messaging that doesn’t matter to them. Facebook’s recent announcement on having relevant information presented on newsfeeds has bucked the recent trend where one wrong move by even the most established brands opened the door to a slew of competitors and challenger brands – all vying for your attention.
Whatever a brand wishes to convey to its audience, it must ‘listen’ intently, have an awareness of current, real-time trends, and actual consumer conversations. Moreover, brands must be prepared to offer multiple, individually targeted messages for their audiences – the right message for the right person. This can evolve into a ‘perfect storm’ – building the foundations of a coherent precision marketing strategy to enable the correct messages to reach the digital consumer.
Cultivating the right information
Social audiences are complex and diverse. Sixty-plus surfers have distinct concerns and passions which will not influence a millennial generation. Speaking broadly to one segment of disengages the rest – and sends them searching for a brand that understands their unique wants and desires.
The good news is all the information you need exists in this social realm. Once you cultivate it, you can offer up the right conversation to the right person, at the right place and right time.
Considering the timeliness of your messaging improves the effectiveness of your precision marketing. As does the channel your message is offered on, and the content itself.
When you apply insights, precisely, in real-time, you allow consumers to see themselves in your brand – which is what makes them love you and want to share. This is something all brands in all categories can do – from retail to financial services.
You can use Facebook monitoring tools to look at any segment or subset of your audience and dial into what they’re thinking and feeling about anything and everything happening right now, and use that intelligence to connect with them – quickly, easily, affordably.
Has precision marketing ever been more appropriate?
Brie Read is CEO of Force Ten Digital.
Further reading on precision marketing
