Social Targeting to the Rights Prospects in the Right Place
Half of the U.S. population is signed up on Facebook at this point. Although Facebook started out as a platform where college friends could connect — it has evolved into a corner post of human networking and commerce. Facebook's impact on the commercial aspects of society is pervasive with comScore reporting in May of 2011 that 100% of the Ad Age Top 100 Advertisers are advertising on facebook.
Already the top advertising property on the Internet, the amount of advertising dollars allocated to Facebook continues to grow at a pace that matches audience growth. But the scale of traffic on Facebook has changed some of the old metrics for success in advertising, with users returning to the same Facebook locations everyday and staying for long stretches of time.
Breakthrough advertising on Facebook is often based on who you know and like, rather than who you are. This is because there has not been a transparent way to target demographic or psychographic profiles that can aggregate robust audiences of similar attributes. Instead the social attribution of Likes and recommendations of friends, and friends of friends has been the primary vehicle. The challenge is that targeting social endorsements is great if the pool of friends is big enough and the brand has self-propelling public relations style cache.
The Facebook advertising platform currently offers only the most basic audience targeting: geography, age, gender, education, relationship status and interests. With these limited tools tuning campaigns to successfully reach enough of the right people at the right time can be a challenge. As a Facebook partner Semcasting has taken up this challenge and offers advertisers a way to extend the demographic and psychographic reach to the Facebook user base.
Facebook microTargeting allows advertisers to market to audiences using both the right and left brain – combining social affinities with robust demographic profiling. Facebook microTargeting provides marketers with a platform to automate the audience definition using Semcasting's predictive modeling. Our reach and frequency optimization process determines the best addressable audience based on a combinations of proximity, demographic attributes, interests, and social linkage.
Facebook microTargeting starts with known customers who have voted with their wallets for a particular product or service. Using Semcasting's proprietary offline database which contains over 750 demographic variables for over 225 million people in the U.S. the Modeler prioritizes the statistical differences between customers and prospects. Semcasting's offline database is used to define the demographic attributes that precisely define their best campaign audience to improve campaign ROI.
The facebook microTargeting application uses publically available information about offline customers to enhance the demographic profiles of social network prospects. Using advanced analytics and comprehensive demographic data about individual and user types we can determine where and when the advertiser is going to be the most successful in reaching a large enough qualified audience that is both in-the-market and who can afford the product or service being offered. User Type segments are used to isolate certain User Types and determine online traffic patterns during certain parts of the day. For example showing an ad for housecleaning services to a stay-at-home mom in the suburbs during the workday or pizza coupons to college students on campus late in the day. Facebook microTargeting produces dramatically better targeting precision of sizable qualified audiences without any infringement of user privacy.
For more information on Semcasting's facebook microTargeting please download our datasheet or contact us at sales@semcasting.com.
Highlighted Database Variable of the Month
With each Newsletter, Semcasting introduces a data variable that has proven to be highly predictive for our customers. Our variables set us apart because of the impact they have in improving the effectiveness of models that can identify a qualified audience. We compiled and built these variables based on people who have voted with their wallets for a particular product or service. They are not simply associated with a cookie or an extrapolated reference based on a visit to a web site. Our data comes from public sources such as the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Federal Reserve, publically recorded ownership transactions and social network affinities. The analytic models that define the variables are built from known transactions over multiple campaigns and project to others in the population who look most like them. Leveraging all 750 variables in our compiled data warehouse provides you with 100% reach both offline and online.
Premium Income Estimate
The Semcasting Premium Income Estimate was designed to provide marketers and analysts with a more realistic portrait of household income in the United States today.
The significant difference with the Semcasting Premium Income Estimate is that it takes into account factors such as cost of living, two income families, tax rates, family composition and life stage into the development of a score. By including local household economic information into thousands of local level models and then aggregating the results. With thousands of models we avoid the averaging effect and are better able to accurately predict local level household incomes.
The practical impact of the Semcasting approach is a broader distribution of annual incomes up to $2 million across 27 income ranges. Semcasting is especially accurate when targeting households with annual earnings over $150,000, which is where the great majority of direct marketing campaigns are focused. Results have been measured to be over 60% more accurate than modeled scores from other providers. Building thousands of local level models to estimate household income and then rolling up the results on a monthly basis means Semcasting Premium Income Estimate is not a one-size-fits all solution that can dilute results and compromise accuracy.
Contact Us
If you need more information about the solutions introduced in this newsletter, or would like to discuss planning for your next direct marketing campaign, please do not hesitate to contact us at sales@semcasting.com.
