Recently, two of the biggest social media sites have announced plans gearing toward providing an improved targeting experience for marketers and advertisers working with their platforms. To many practitioners, this is great news since no marketing professional ever turns a blind eye at opportunities to sharpen their ability to hammer the point home with the right audience. But, underneath the obvious frame of these developments, there are far more important lessons to be learned, especially in lead generation.
Near the end of August, Twitter made its new “interest targeting” feature publicly known through a related blog post. This is according to an article from the Direct Marketing News website which also mentions that “rumors” of Facebook’s new user targeting program also began surfacing on the same day as Twitter’s announcement. Apparently, Facebook will be enabling brands to target accounts through contact information provided by users to the businesses while Twitter’s targeting tool allows marketers to select their audience by choosing among 350 “interest categories.”
However, beside the immediate implications that these new targeting features have on marketing campaigns at large, you can reasonably draw some very useful B2B lead generation lessons out of these developments as well. Oftentimes, you have to look at the facts in a different light to find out what they’re really saying and get the full message. There are larger forces at play here, and it helps to take a different view to uncover them. Here are some not-so-obvious implications to lead generation that this particular story has:
1. Narrow your niche down. You may think your advanced B2B lead generation or email campaign targeting strategy already speaks to a sufficiently narrow audience. But there might still be some grounds for further specialization. Like social media marketers looking to enhance their targeting accuracy, you need to constantly look for ways to further pinpoint your ideal phone prospects or email readers as audiences are always evolving.
2. Paint the full picture. While targeting requires you to focus on specific details, it doesn’t give you a sound excuse to lose sight of the complete prospect picture. As more and more data on your target prospects’ interests, preferences, motivations, behavior, etc. enter your dashboards and databases, it becomes increasingly easier to get lost in a sea of information and incorrectly focus on only a handful of attributes rather than the set that characterizes your buyer profile or campaign audience.
3. Tweak your toolkit. According to the Direct Marketing News article mentioned earlier, Twitter’s recently-added targeting tool serves a different purpose (prospecting) than that of Facebook’s rumored program (re-targeting). In your own lead generation campaign, you should fully be aware when and how to use specific tools like targeted B2B telemarketing or email blasts as well as rethink your usage approach.
4. Expand your reach. Aside from underscoring the clear need for specialization and audience segmentation, the above news article also implies expanding your lead generaton scope from your current prospect base. In email marketing, you typically do this through contact list building which also applies in a similar way to growing your cold calling contact database in telemarketing.
5. Don’t cross the line. As one of the marketing figures cited in the above-mentioned article, Rebecca Lieb believes that there’s more to lead generation than just finding the right audience. You also have to worry about timing, frequency, relevance, etc. – all recurring concerns in other lead generation channels. There has to be a balance in these components; otherwise, you risk alienating your audience.
What other lead generation insights can you take away from the reported enhancement in social media audience targeting?
