Sniping (marketing) your target audience using social media

The power of social media in marketing to target audience, is not a secret. Companies have been using it to virally promoting their product and services for several years now. Although given a budget and current economic climate marketers are asked to focus and avoid experimentation where ever possible. Social Media marketing can be divided into two broad categories:

• Scattergun marketing: It is the effect where marketers invest money into a campaign where the aim is to get as many eye balls as possible. Sort of firing many pellets into the air hoping that one or two might hit the target. Most however miss and fall harmlessly to the ground.

A good example are companies using traditional media like Newspapers, TV and Radio. The usership here is varied and only a small proportion of the subjects are really interested in your product and only a tinier proportion of them will buy or use your product or service.

• Sniper marketing: As the name suggests, is focused on targeting your demographic as tightly as possible. Producing campaigns where losses are minimal.

So how do you go about producing these campaigns on social networks:

1. Choose your social network carefully: Just because your entire demographic is on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean that it is most favourable for your campaign. Example: It makes more sense for John Lewis to push its furniture and products on MyDeco.com (Social network for interior design).  Obviously most of John Lewis’s client are available on other social networks but this is an obvious fit for them.
   
2. Targeted advertising on social networks: It is now possible to target a demographic on sites like Facebook (go to Facebook Advertising) where an advertiser can specify who would see their adverts. You can choose from a wide variety of categories to select your target demographic: Age, sex, location and also keywords. A good example of this is how dating sites target singles on Facebook: Similarly there are examples of investment websites like AngelsDen targeting company directors. Obviously the ROI (Return on Investment) is really high for such campaigns.
3. Using Humans V/S Automated marketing: It is almost inevitable to have real people marketing and continuously interacting with your customers. Often though it is difficult to identify what conversations are going on in the webosphere and how could your marketing staff interact with these potential customers. This is where Twitter could be a nice way to monitor the topics people are actively discussing. Using Twitter.com in conjunction with TweetDeck or Twitter Search is an interesting option, whereby you can specify keyword or phrases of interest to you. Below I’m searching for cheap mortgage. I found more than 100 conversations :
4. Time consuming + engaging = generates sales: The process of sniping takes time and requires you to engage with your customers. There are various ways you can do that: On linkedIn you can ask them questions One example is: Hitesh Mehta asking a question about user experience of a RSS Reader. We (Kwiqq) have run a simple White Paper campaign on top social wesbite tools with a lot of success. With readers converting into clients.
5. Deals to be made: Lastly if you are a corporation or a major influencer in the market. The ability to leverage your position is even higher. Here is an example of how Online Hotel Booking company Booking.com provide feedback to users and hence gets significant traffic through Google Maps (see ‘Overview’ section):

There are still opportunities for several deals in this space. One hot property is TasteBook.com, allows users to make their own cookbook. A company specialising in cookery products would be ideal to strike a deal with TasteBook.

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