There are over 2 billion users on Facebook, while Instagram has finally surpassed the 1 billion mark. Truly amazing numbers.
For you as a business owner who’s looking to up your marketing game, this means that your customers are out there, ready and waiting.
One snag, though: If you post your content without much thought, you won’t hit the spot. Instead, you’ll be as good as shooting an arrow into the universe in the vain hope that you’ll hit something.
What you need to do is be more precise so that you target a) the right people with b) the right message at c) the right time.
This is what precision marketing can help with.
What Is Precision Marketing?
So, Facebook is home to 2 billion users. Meanwhile, there are millions and millions of businesses all trying to sell something. Many of these businesses are vying with rivals for the same customers and we’re all drowning in content – content that many of us don’t want.
Your customers no longer respond to the traditionally clumsy “spray and pray” approach, but instead want more relevancy and personalization. This is where precision marketing comes in.
With precision marketing, you now have more power to produce more relevant content that hits the spot with the right people.Precision marketing means that you use tools and crunch data to launch a more data-driven, personalized marketing campaign that boosts engagement, conversions and sales.
The ultimate aim of precision marketing is to improve your revenue, but the first step is to reduce episodes of customer frustration. In other words, it prevents you from bombarding the wrong customers with the wrong content at the wrong time.
Take Facebook, for example, a social media platform that has evolved into one of the most sophisticated marketing tools on the planet. It now delivers highly targeted video ads to the right audience. The accuracy is pinpoint, with the social media giant able to use back engine algorithms that are focused on an individual’s unique purchase pattern.
Precision Marketing and Market Segmentation
For precision marketing to work effectively, market segmentation is required. This is a technique that breaks your market down into smaller, more targeted segments of customers who have their own unique needs. A segment could be specific to unmarried men over 50 who have no children, or it could be a lot broader, such as just men.
To segment markets, you need to harvest data about your customer behavior. To illustrate this, picture an online retailer offering discounts to their customers, but also tracking everything they purchase whole monitoring their demographic data after they’ve signed up for an account. The data is crunched by marketing departments who use it to learn a lot more about their customers – specifically what they want and who they are.
Once the data has been crunched, you can then create better marketing campaigns that target the right people.
How to Develop a Precision Marketing Strategy and Boost Your Revenue
To make sure that your precision marketing strategy is as accurate and focused as possible, your plan must be comprehensive and carefully conceived.
Let’s picture a hotel chain that caters to businesses and families who use their hotels often. In order to boost revenue, it’s a good idea to have ‘retention’ as the overriding goal of their precision marketing strategy.
So let’s say that the hotel chain creates a top-notch rewards program that incentivizes customer loyalty. After introduction customers to the loyalty program successfully, they now wish to find a way to grow the membership.
So they take a look at the vast amount of data they’ve collected on their customers via their online initiatives. Once they’ve crunched the data, the hotel chain decide that a direct mail marketing campaign is in fact the best way to establish a proper relationship with their repeat customers.
Before they do that, they segment their customers based on past buying decisions, frequency of hotel stays, and so on. Then, they launch an effective mail marketing campaign that targets the right customers with the right offers, deals, discounts and so on.
This is just one example, but you need to leverage data from various sources and maximize different channels for your precision marketing strategy to be effective.
For example, social media is going to play a key role. Social media is where people go to have conversations, share things they love – and occasional express distaste for things.
You can use a tool like Sysomos to gather data from social media sites so that you’re able to understand your customer insights better. This then allows you to tailor personalized content and send out more individualized messages.
Installing a POS card reader your website is helpful, too. As well as increasing payment options and making the payment process as smooth as possible, a POS card reader also collects data on each customer which you can then use to improve your future product recommendations.
Conclusion
All in all, precision marketing is the art of focusing your message so that what your customers receive is exactly what they want to receive. This means less clutter, less noise and more revenue. The more you know about your customers, the better you can tailor your marketing campaigns.
About the Author
Michelle Deery is a copywriter that writes blog content for Heroic Search, a link building agency based in Tulsa. Her work has been seen in publications such as Entrepreneur and she has been writing marketing content for over six years.
