Here are five ways that marketers can use social media to personalize their marketing.
1. Use big data to learn about all aspects of your audience’s lives
Your audience shares intimate details about their lives on social media, and big data has become the best way to tap into these social insights. The more data you have about your audience, the better targeted and personalized you can make your messages.
2. Identify key audience members
Monitor who is most active across your social channels and amplify their activity. You can offer them rewards for sharing, or give them early access to your content. They will appreciate the attention, and you will reinforce their brand loyalty.
3. Develop cross-channel strategies
Social media can be used to personalize marketing on other channels as well. The insights you gather from social media can be used to create better ads, blog posts, events, partnerships and other activities.
4. Scale one-to-one efforts to your audience at large
Personalization doesn’t have to mean small-scale. Brands can use social networks like Twitter and Facebook in tandem with other cross-channel efforts like email marketing, to send personalized messages based on trigger points and group characteristics.
5. Create buyer personas for better content and targeting
In order to scale personalization efforts, brands must create buyer personas that represent the exact center of their target audience. Social data about habits, behaviors and preferences can inform these personas, and they can then be used to create more compelling content and better distribution methods.