It’s 2017 and you are about to release a new product that will take the world by storm. Every day companies are advancing technology, and making consumers’ lives easier through new goods and services. While innovation continues to grow, so does the way in which these products are marketed. Even the marketing landscape from five years ago is completely different than it is today,
With products and services designed to offer convenience like never before, people cannot be bothered to gain marketing information. Luckily, there are a variety of online tools that marketers can now use to gather their data.
Marketers can use this in one of two ways. They can first determine what demographics, and psychographics they want to target, then find the best geographic region to market towards. They can also use it in reverse to make changes to their marketing plan, if they want to stay in the same geographic region. Claritas gathers all the information and even suggests other things the consumers may have in common such as places they go to eat, cars they drive, and what hobbies they partake in (Claritas, LLC, 2017).
Another great tool marketers can use is Google Analytics. Almost every social media platform has a built in analytics system to track your page’s traffic. You may want to see how many likes a certain post has generated, or how far a specific tweet reached. Google Analytics goes a step further and analyzes an entire website’s traffic, breaking it down into demographic information, lifestyle groups, and how the consumer arrived at the site. This helps marketers choose where to advertise online (Kaplan, 2017). If your target market is middle-aged soccer moms, you may realize you will have better luck advertising on Facebook, rather than Instagram
It is important to use tools, like the ones mentioned above, to pinpoint your target early on in the marketing plan. This saves times and resources, as you can target just the people who are likely to see the advertisement, rather than trying to cover a large area, or broad audience. Social media marketers can are able to quickly see what posts receive engagement and which ones do not, driving future creative decisions.
References
Claritas MyBestSegments. (2017). Claritas, LLC. Retrieved from https://segmentationsolutions.nielsen.com/mybestsegments/Default.jsp?ID=100&pageName=What%2Bis%20Segmentation&menuOption=learnmore&filterstate=&sortby=segment_code&prevSegID=CLA.PZP
Kaplan, A. (2017). 6 Online Tools Anyone Can Use to Identify Their Target Audience. Hey Now! Media. Retrieved from http://info.heynowmedia.com/6-online-tools-anyone-can-use
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