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Customer Centricity on Steroids

Although the days of mass advertising are not dead, they are on the decline. According to eMarketer, U.S. television ad spending is expected to reach a healthy $68 billion for 2022,1 but spending and viewership levels for T.V. ads have been decreasing for years and are not expected to rebound.

By contrast, spending on social media advertising has exploded. Social network ad spending is expected to hit a record $57 billion this year, nearly triple what it was just five years ago.2

Facebook, which accounts for over 80% of the total spent on social media ads, crossed a milestone in late 2020, when the number of active advertisers using the social networking platform to promote their products and services topped a record 10 million.

Leveraging Social Media to Target Your Messaging

The rising dominance of social media advertising is largely driven by the ability of social media platforms to micro-target the audience to cut through the noise and get the right message to the right customer at the right time. Social media giants have amassed huge data caches that include detailed demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral detail on their similarly massive user bases (Facebook is now approaching 3 billion users). This data can be mined to isolate customer groups that have specific interests, opinions, and triggers. Applying some predictive analytics, advertisers can then design highly personalized marketing appeals to these micro-segments, thereby optimizing their response and conversion rates.

The cost effectiveness of micro-targeting makes it an attractive advertising and outreach option for B-to-C companies, both large and small. However, there are challenges that marketers should be aware of, and it is often helpful to engage social media specialists to help avoid the pitfalls.

The Downside to Narrowing Your Focus

For example, sometimes too much detail about your audience can be a bad thing. It may lead marketers to define their micro-segments too narrowly, preemptively eliminating significant numbers of high-value prospects that fail to meet the initial criteria. Being able to target an ultra-specific audience may also lead marketers to become lazy in their ad content or appeal. Time and money focused on micro-targeting should not be at the expense of great ad content or a positive customer experience.

Micro-targeting can be a powerful tool for organizations to build markets and deepen relationships with customers. If you are exploring using social media in your outreach efforts, we are here to help.

1 TV Ad Spending 2022, Insider Intelligence, June 14, 2022.

2 Social network advertising spending in the United States from 2016 to 2022, Statista, February 23, 2022.

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