by samThis type of marketing is the new radio commercial; why target such a broad demographic when you can tailor your ads for your perfect audience?
Let’s look at a lowdown of the terms:
Microtargeting: This is a technique mainly used by political parties and election campaigns. The tactics used in these types of campaigns rely on transmitting a tailored message to a subgroup of the electorate based on unique information about that subgroup.
Communicating with voters will vary based on what the campaign believes will reach out to them best; this means platforms can be anything from direct contact, home visits, and events to email, text, phone calls, etc.
Hypertargeting: This refers to the ability to deliver advertising content to specific interest-based segments in a network, enabling advertisers to tap into information and demographics like never before. This ability on social networking sites to target ads based on very specific criteria was just one important step towards precision performance marketing.
General fields that hyper-targeting draws its material from are the following 3 sources: registration, profile, and behavioural history.
Registration: basic data gathered when users register for site access: age, sex, location.
Profile: detailed content completed by active users; favourite music, activities, brands, etc.
Behavioural history: data gathered from online activities like sites visited, purchases made, groups joined, etc.
This type of targeting can be seen mainly on social networking sites such as Facebook, where all of the above information is generated and exchanged freely between the site and the user, as well as the user to their friends. Keywords, mainly produced and gathered in ‘behavioural history’ will influence advertisements on your profile, producing the ads they think you want to see and will be most likely to click on. LinkedIn is a good place to target professionals, whereby with Facebook advertising you can reach out to over 750 million users of varying demographics (the current number of people registered as Facebook users).
Nanotargeting: Nanotargeting is similar in concept to hyper-targeting but will narrow the search criteria down even further to find that one individual within millions who will respond to your ad and become the ideal target audience.
This range of ad targeting means that whether your perfect audience is one person in a million or one million people, you can engage with them in a way that advertisers could not have done previously without this amount of information.
Traditional marketing campaigns have had ways of targeting their preferred demographics before, primarily using radio and television shows to gauge which type of age group or sex would be receiving their advertisements at a particular time. Yet hyper-targeting, and therefore social media, has once again struck gold with this type of marketing.
Pinpointing their ideal customer through the information provided by the customer, targeting them, and then building a relationship with them; even potentially selling products to them via social media, such as with Facebook advertising, is a breakthrough for all programmatic advertising agencies.