No big data. No problem.

Big Data is not easily available for everyone.  We have a couple small data tips to help you use social media and digital advertising to find your target audience

It seems that every day the digital world is making it easier to segment the whole world into smaller and smaller categories. But, where do you start and how are different platforms useful?

The best place to start is to write down a list of all the information that comprises your target audience. From there you can separate into Geographics (where people are), Demographics (basic information on who they are) and Psychographics (what they like, how they think, personality traits).

2 Great (free) Resources to Get You Started:

• Learn about who loves you already- If you are still unsure who your target audience is, you can start by looking at who has liked your company page on Facebook. You know this group of people likes your company and have taken active steps to stay in touch with you. Use the people tab in your Facebook insights to find age and gender. To go further, you can see what people interacted with you on your page to begin narrowing down interests for your target audience.
• Dig deeper- You can use the Facebook data you gathered along with with Google Analytics’ technology to track demographics and interests of your website visitors. This combined data will help you create a profile of those people interested in your company and products.  Enable the Google Analytics’ tracker and combine this information with the behavior trends to narrow down who your visitors are and why they came to your site.

Once you narrow down who you are looking for, you can find them online a number of ways.

2 Ways to Connect To Your Target Audience:

• LinkedIn– For B2B companies, LinkedIn is a great way to find and reach your target audience. You can segment ads or sponsored posts by a plethora of filters such as location, company size, industry, seniority level, education, age, gender and/or skill. If you have LinkedIn Premium, you can target the same categories in an advanced search. This will allow you to gather a specific list of people you are interested in reaching along with who you have in common.
• Facebook– Facebook advertising allows you to reach people with particular interests. You can easily sponsor your page or a particular post to reach people whose interests line up with your company or those you are targeting. If you would like to get even more granular, you can choose advanced options which allow you all of the geographic and demographic options as well as promoting by category. The categories go into politics, parenting, and many other topics. Facebook will then target those specifics.

While the rest of the world wrestles with the concept of Big Data we encourage you to use these “little data” tactics to help you get ahead.