Building and Engaging Your Target Audience
Engagement. The word is thrown around a lot, but what does it mean? And more important, what does it mean for your business? If you have “engagement” as a goal central to success, make sure you can define it with certainty and within specific parameters.
Engagement on social media may mean re-tweeting a post or pinning a picture. It may mean entering a contest, or opening that email and clicking through to an article. It might be page views or time spent on your website. It may not mean any one of these things as well – if page views don’t equal engagement in your measurements, then make sure you don’t include them in your results.
Once you can define engagement as it applies to your marketing, now you can work towards the best approach. Facebook, for example, considers the reading of posts, sharing of content and participation on the page as engagement, so know that in order to see increases in these activities, your headlines, content and page substance needs to be inviting, interesting, relevant and useful.
Remember, you are a customer out there in the real world, too – your experiences matter and can translate to successes in your professional world. What engages you? Why? What doesn’t? Chances are, those same approaches can be modified to work for your business.
Proper segmentation is at the forefront of engagement – you can’t engage someone with the wrong message or content. According to a recent Razorfish study, only 13% of digital marketing executives are delivering segmented experiences. And remember, segmentation is not the same as targeting. Targeting, like all other aspects of online advertising, is something that everyone claims to be doing—but in reality—very few actually are. In the age of response-based data and staggeringly accurate targeting algorithms, advertisers should expect nothing less than pinpoint accuracy from their marketing efforts.
For example, email custom audience products enable advertisers to ask for their advertisements to only be shown to users with a very specific set of demographic data. Gender, geographical location, spending habits, homeownership, income level, marital status as well as other key attributes, help advertisers create “lookalike audiences” that match their very best existing customers. These emerging products feature innovative technology that allows advertisers to target new consumers with unparalleled granular accuracy.
Email marketers, for example, can now look at an advertiser’s existing customer base and provide very accurate demographic details about those individuals, and can subsequently provide access to millions of other consumers that match those exact characteristics. Utilizing highly sophisticated response-based targeting algorithms that are enhanced by the demographic and behavioral data of millions of consumers, sophisticated email marketers can then identify new customers for advertisers based on their existing customer’s attributes. The analysis is done so the advertiser’s customer CRM data remains both anonymous and secure, while the deployment allows for comprehensive control and brand-safe distribution.