Social Media Campaigns – Market Segmentation

The success of a marketing campaign depends on find an effective way to reach our audience effectively.

Traditionally, segmentation is provided by media companies or result of analysis of  information in the company contact database. To target a bride with wedding-related product, I would advertise in or run a joint campaign with a vertical publication, say, “New Bride Magazine”. Or I can query my customer database trying to find good targets based on data attributes (geography, industry segment, engagement level, etc).

In social media, companies can gather more information to customize messages based on the interactions over a long-term engagement. But there are limits on our ability to scale personal engagement at that level. Segmentation based on static analysis remains important.

Social Networks know a lot about its members. For example, Facebook and Google can help you to segment through targeted advertising or by letting you peek into the demographics or behavioral patterns of users. The audience also segment itself by congregating around LinkedIn discussion groups, making their personal profiles available, or using Twitter hash tags, for example.

Just because there are several social channels available to you, that doesn’t mean you will push every campaign through all of them. Who are you trying to reach? What actions do you want to trigger?

Here are a few factors for campaign segmentation:

• Targeted Advertisement – Social networks will let you select your audience according to demographic variables or display your ads next to content that is relevant to your business.
• Social Media followers –  Every time you post in Social Media, your followers will see your message in their timeline. A social media campaign relies on propagation of the message through social connections. If they “Like” or “Retweet” your post, their followers will also see it. Your followers help to segment the market by judging whether your content is of interest of their friends.
• Social Media specialty communities – LinkedIn and Facebook support groups with specific interests. Twitter has communities congregating around “hash tags”. Provided your content has value and is aligned with the topics of interest, you can publish to people in those groups.