Marketing to one through millions.

I was recently looking at several ads on social networking sites.  If you have never placed an ad on a site you may not know how targeted they are.  Not only can you select an audience by gender or age, you can further define your audience by any information used in a profile:

• Political party
• Education
• Location (City, State, Country, Network)
• Groups they are listed in association with
• Favorite books, movies, music

As you can imagine this allows an ad to specifically target an individual out of millions of readers or users.    This is not unique to social marketing, many web sites now require you to create a profile and a user name.  All of this information that is requested allows the information shared to be targeted to a direct individual.  With the addition of a few cookies on your system the site will even remember where you last visited when on the site and what you were looking for or purchased. 

Gone are the days when marketers had to wait months to get feedback on a product or promotion.  Most market savvy companies can make changes in the afternoon based on feedback from the morning.  Traffic is the number one driver on any site, but targeted traffic that delivers specific information on a customer is priceless.  Consumers demand more personalized information and have come to expect that sites can deliver targeted answers and will make purchasing decisions accordingly.

Looking to increase your web traffic or online purchasing decisions?  Consider these hints:

• When selling online allow users to create a profile and specify what information they want from you (this also cuts down on SPAM).
• Do not try to send the same message to every user.  Tailor the messages based on the information your customer provided.
• Review new profiles once a week and send a quick “welcome” or “thank you” email to your customers.  Avoid using a generic auto responder as those are often ignored.

Targeted, tailored, timely messages and interaction take your site from being just another web address to a personal business.