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The world of marketing has always been throbbing with life, ripe for changes, innovation and evolution. Over the years, many different techniques and concepts have entered the world of marketing, some of which have remained effective and some have lost their flavor over time. In recent times, this change has been driven more and more by the increasingly connected nature of people’s lives, the infiltration of the internet and smart devices into daily life and the advent of radical concepts such as IoT and Big Data. These changes have given rise to the need to continually re-evaluate and re-invent standard marketing techniques so as to be more relevant and more successful in the current scenario.
One of the ways that marketing has changed perceptibly over the years is in context with the amount of information marketers now have to work with. With the arrival of Big Data, the amount of information at their disposal has increased ten-fold, bringing along both problems and benefits. It has also given rise to certain techniques that initially started out as marketing techniques. But with passage of time they have found their way into other important activities like politics and digital supremacy. One of these important techniques is what is known as Microtargeting.
What is Microtargeting?
In essence, Microtargeting is a streamlined marketing strategy. It uses thorough analysis of various online signals such as
- user data
- consumer behavior
- demographics
- browsing histories
These crucial signals obtained from data sources all over the internet, helps them to understand their tastes, preferences and interests. The ultimate aim is to understand the interests of individuals, small groups of like-minded people and also larger representative groups. They then use the information gleaned from the data study to influence them towards a specific product, marketing campaign, or brand. Strategic Microtargeting at the present times relies heavily on inputs from the vast data fields of Big Data, and is a modern approach of the information age that has so far helped companies get ahead of their competition. It has also helped products to reach dizzy heights of success, and political campaigns to win over the confidence and trust of voters in high-impact areas.
Microtargeting is a whole made from many parts.
- To start off with, it contains a large drive to collect data from the target group. This data, sourced from the internet, can contain a number of different nuances like purchasing habits, browsing patterns, social presence, and page visits.
- This data is then further refined into actionable sets of insightful information using analysis and processing.
- The insights are used to send micro targeted ads to that target group with the effort to win their trust and confidence.
Microtargeting has assisted marketers with getting more and more people to believe in their offerings. It has also played a significant part in shaping the fortunes of political campaigns, by providing interest groups with a concrete idea of how their candidates might perform during the crucial day of counting votes.
Why is Microtargeting Successful?
Nearly every connected individual has experienced some form of Microtargeting or the other in the past. These may comprise of automated phone calls, email messages from companies who curiously know what kind of product you might like, or push notifications on your mobile devices suggesting that you try out certain products or apps. Irrespective of whether you like the content in question, or the products or people they endorse, there is no denying the fact that Microtargeting is something that actually works. From startups and small businesses to large conglomerates and political parties, Microtargeting is a cost-effective, result-oriented way of achieving actionable outcomes fast and easy.
The reason why Microtargeting works so well is that it appeals to a part of your brain that is always wishing to be impressed. If a company knows what products you are likely to buy based on your purchase history and browsing habits, you are likely to interpret it this way – the company considers you important. If a political campaigner contacts you to tell you that their candidate will expressly work to solve the issues close to your heart, it gives you the notion of importance. This psychological notion is what makes Microtargeting such an effective tool in marketing as well as in other spheres.
How can Microtargeting be used in Different Contexts?
As a versatile, effective and essentially mutable strategy, Microtargeting can find its uses in many different core areas, and still deliver rich outcomes. Due to the fact that it is almost always a successful way of getting people to stand up and notice you, many entities use Microtargeting in different, creative ways to achieve the results they need. Let us take a look at a few places where Microtargeting has been known to produce great results, and the modes of operation followed.
Small Businesses and Startups
Web data extraction, over time, has become a fast, precise and easy affair. This is primarily driven by a number of open source and commercial web crawlers now available on the internet, just waiting to be tweaked according to your requirements and utilized for your interests. Big Data management has also become easier, with recent successes in the use of schema-less databases in conjunction with relational databases, yielding great results when it comes to the efficient storage and processing of data. All this means that Microtargeting is a great way for startups and small businesses to get that flying start they always look for.
If you are a small business owner, there are a number of different ways you can use Microtargeting to accomplish your goals. These include
- Sending your user base customized polls depending on the kind of products and services they might want to see you offer
- By offering different kinds of special offers or free giveaways
- Targeting possible requirements of user groups based on the information you have gleaned from your data collection efforts
This ensures business owners to achieve ideal market segmentation and deliver tailored marketing campaigns to the diverse groups for better conversion success.
Uses in Politics and Related Fields
Microtargeting has recently been used successfully in the field of politics. Using different deep crawl techniques and predictive analytics, political campaign managers can come up with a lot of behavioral and psychological insight about members of their electorate. Armed with these insights they can then pitch their ideas and promises to the public in a targeted way. The US Republican and Democratic parties have been using these targeted marketing measures with great effect to draw valuable votes their way during elections.
The web surfing habits, social networking activities and purchasing habits of people leave a trail of information on the internet, which these campaigns can harvest to arrive at closely accurate insights about small groups of people – insights that can sometimes also include personal data.
When all this information is analyzed, it is turned into predictions about which way a single individual’s vote might go, and then the Microtargeting can start off the process of winning people over. It is a natural, organic process that yields much better results than old, stale techniques like direct mail and cold calling. Using Microtargeting politicians have enjoyed unprecedented success in many key areas of the world.
Mobility and Microtargeting
In the world of mobility, Microtargeting is what makes businesses click. With the insurgence of mobile apps, it has now become a lot easier to track the online activities of the millions of smartphone and tablet users around the world. There are a number of app analytics options that you can use to successfully track every online move of your customers, and these moves can then be stored into databases and analyzed to find out behavioral patterns and common influences. Armed with these insights, you can very easily commence with Microtargeting your audience with specific offers, and information and updates about your offerings. You can expect to receive a rewarding response in terms of participation, favorable brand recall, and loyalty.
Microtargeting is the process that has consistently come in handy for those in the mobility business to secure customer interest, get more customers and boost sales using targeted marketing campaigns focusing on superior information about their customers. With superior integration, great customers and the ability to give them what they want, this is a potent tool in the right hands.
To wrap up
In conclusion, we can easily say that Microtargeting is one of the most influential and important ways of reaching to your target audience in this new age of information and Big Data. It is the perfect tool for a multitude of possibilities, and due to its versatility and effectiveness we can only look forward to its increased adoption across multiple industry areas and disciplines.
As Big Data and related technologies pass through time and get further developed, Microtargeting is sure to become much more of a potent tool with more possibilities and impact. As of now, it is something that can come in handy for anyone – be it an individual with something to say, a big business conglomerate that serves millions of people or a politician’s constituency and campaign management.
