Companies have to pay constant attention to their audiences. When they do that, they can give the right content to the right audience at the right time.
Consumers are being targeted with hundreds of thousands of different types of content daily, they are learning to pay less attention to irrelevant content on their devices.
Paying attention to audience behavior means understanding the behavior the target audience demonstrates, based on the conversations they have and the actions they take.
Paying attention is about listening carefully to identify people who are expressing a willingness to buy products and services from a company.
This eventually results in hyper-targeting.
Hyper-targeting
Hyper-targeting is a type of marketing strategy where a target customer has been clearly identified.
The target customer displays a specific set of behaviors that show a propensity of making a purchase decision.
This strategy is often used by marketers to deliver messages to a very narrow audience.
Hyper-targeting necessitates a deep understanding of the buying behaviors of the target audience. The first step towards accomplishing it is to collect profile information and monitor behavior across social media platforms.
Making Hyper-targeting Work
Let us explore an example of how hyper-targeting can work.
A company which manufactures women’s coats and jackets has gathered enough data to know that their target customers, who are 25-40 years old businesswomen, will start buying jackets and coats from November.
With this knowledge, the retailer would run ads on different blogs on winter dressing to warm up their audience (pun intended). Instagram and Facebook are also great selling channels.
The marketing team of the company also began to find customers who were blogging and tweeting about their intentions to buy a coat or a jacket for the winter.
When the audience would be very close to making a purchase, the retailer would interact with them in a supportive and meaningful, yet non-salesy way.
This strategy would cause conversion rates to improve by more than several times when compared to advertising on traditional media.
What Requires Attention
Identifying sales prospects for products and services generates a significant impact on sales. A marketer has to be careful about what to pay attention to.
A lot of businesses are now familiar with marketing automation which involves nurturing and scoring.
Lead nurturing programs help to guide prospects down a specific path which is based on the specific behaviors that they have expressed.
Social media scoring is the method of measuring people’s online influence.
This is calculated by using data from social networks.
The scoring models include both explicit and implied information. Explicit scores are calculated by the information provided by the prospect, such as the size of the business and its geographical location among others.
Implied scores are obtained from monitoring the behavior of the prospects, such as website visits, clicks, and email opening rates.
Monitoring Tools
Some popular social scoring tools in use today are Nexalogy, Hootsuite, and Reputalogy, among others.
These tools allow a business to track and measure what people are saying about it and its products.
They also give real-time news for a specific subject and can even identify the most influential users across each topic.
