Why advertisers are interested in your social media profile

Marketers are on the look out for alternative mediums to connect with their relevant active target audiences on digital

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What’s in a social media profile? We say hidden opportunities for brand marketers to target a prospective customer based on his/her interests, behaviour, and much more.
Emergence of data has empowered advertising partners with access to various trend curves, which helps optimise the efficiency and relevance of campaigns and add value to targeted advertising.

Modern businesses lean towards online advertising as a budget-friendly and quick medium to reach out to their target audience. With the emergence of social media, mobile internet surfing, and usage of mobile applications, banner ads on the web saw a steady decline, with consumers turning a blind eye towards that spot, leading marketers to look out for alternative mediums to connect with their relevant active target audiences on digital. With a majority of internet users spending time on social media platforms and browsing beautifully crafted interactive websites and mobile applications, online advertisers turned to platforms that provided them targeting based on consumer demographics and usage patterns. Mobile targeted ads have risen as the clear winner when trying to tap the on-the-move consumer.

While the internet encompasses an unimaginable realm of information, targeted advertising is every marketer’s dream as it allows brands to filter through a multitude of internet users by finding different elements based on their online behaviour. This enables advertisers to be more precise in finding and engaging with relevant consumers online. The brand’s target audience analysis and current market trends are what are best leveraged through the specific filtration that social media enables you with. This not only results in a higher number of relevant clicks but also increases sales drastically.

Advertisers on Facebook can opt to target their audience on the basis of location, demographics, interests, and behaviours. It also allows you to target specific audiences like your existing customers, with their custom audience features, which includes targeting your database or lookalike audiences. Twitter helps you choose from a wide variety of categories and also allow brands to select profiles of people/ brands that they can target to market their products/services.

Social media advertising platforms make targeting more relevant and deliver value when it comes to results. With demographic level targeting, interest and behaviour level targeting, mobile level targeting; the effectiveness of the ads and the chances of them reaching interested customers is dramatically higher. It also allows the ad networks to keep track of a large amount of data pertaining to a user’s online behaviour to targeted ads specifically.

For instance, a hotel can cater to its audience around the locality, as well as fans of its competitors. Similarly, a luxury beauty brand can target its store database and target its customers on social media. Leading application players (food, health care, cab aggregators) can target their prospective users on the basis of location, mobile technology (iOS/Android) and their interests, once a profiling exercise has been completed.

Mobile apps are the next best way to increase brand recall and increase brand engagement. Apps that are compatible with certain specifications can be targeted through mobile level targeting filters to drive relevance of the ads. Wi-Fi-only targeting allows delivering better and complete video views. Targeted advertising is a smart practice undertaken by advertisers to deliver high performance ad campaigns. Timing also plays an important factor for online advertising. A food delivery offer when promoted during lunch hours towards office-going audiences, showcasing delectable delicacies helps boost conversions and leads to a hike in sales.

Behavioural advertising is a practice that is based on a user’s internet browsing activity. This allows brands to deliver adverts to web users who reflect their interests. It’s safe, transparent, and designed to empower the consumer with relevant content. In this way, advertising can be made as relevant and useful as possible. Online behavioural advertising is also known as interest-based advertising. It is a way of placing advertisements on the websites that one visits while making ads more relevant on the basis of their needs and preferences. Shared interests are grouped together based on previous web browsing activity and web users are then served advertising which matches their shared interests. Relevant ads can also be delivered based upon the website content one has been viewing on other sites. This is known as ‘re-targeting’. The audience that is collated for re-targeting ads can also be used to create a lookalike audience on Facebook ads manager.

Conversion tracking is a good way for brands to understand how effective their advertising and marketing activities are. It not only helps track whether the relevant TG has purchased the product, signed up for your newsletter or filled out a form to receive more information. By segmenting the media campaign to different target audiences, it also allows advertisers to understand which segment generates a higher conversion and this, in turn, helps optimise the performance of the campaign.

In conclusion, while the realm of the internet seems vast and endless, social media advertising and niche targeting is a simple and cost-effective way to not only increase sales and connect with your end consumers, but also build strong customer loyalty at a time when competition is brutal and customers are fickle minded.

-By Arashdeep Sandhu, Head, MindShift Metrics

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.