Prior to the Internet, targeted marketing was very difficult and imprecise. TV advertisements had demographic information based off self-reporting a few days’ worth of TV watching every year. The information was inaccurate and especially didn’t work well for shows with split demographics where one of the demographics under-reported.

Frequently, ads would run based on what the show’s producers’ told them the target demographic is, and this would frequently not correlate to who actually watched the show. A notable example is Sesame Street, which was initially aimed at children in the five to nine year old demographic, but was retargeted to younger children in the mid to late 1990′s after producers realized that younger children were watching it.

Sesame Street doesn’t run ads, but imagine if shows like Sesame Street had access to accurate demographic information. Now imagine that they could run different commercials to different viewers. They would be able to target narrower demographics and get paid more by advertisers. Online advertising is based off the ability to narrowly target people based on demographic and other information, such as their interests and what they search for on Google.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools let marketing managers and ad agency people know what’s being said about their campaigns on socialmedia, like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook. Good tools like Alerti also provide analytics so that you can see where people are talking about your product on social media. But how can this help you run a better campaign?

Instant Feedback

In traditional ad campaigns, it can take weeks to find out if people are responding well. Even with AdSense, you usually want to wait a little while to smooth out variances between different days, since some days will see significantly higher conversions per click than other days. This means that you can spend thousands of dollars on a campaign that isn’t working very well, and you won’t know it until it’s too late.

Social media monitoring tools, however, give you instant feedback on your campaign since they let you see exactly what your target audience is saying about you. If you run a guest posting campaign, or another campaign that people might talk about on social media, a social media monitoring tool can let you instantly know what people are saying about it.

Figure Out Where People Are Talking About Your Company

What people are saying about you is as important as when you know what they’re saying, and where they are saying it. Let’s say that you have an equal number of potential leads on Facebook and Twitter. People on Facebook are twice as likely to talk about your company positively than people on Twitter. Plus, you know that Facebook comments and status updates carry more weight than Twitter reposts. You can take this information and know that you should focus more advertising funds on Facebook advertising, than on Twitter advertising.

About the Author: This is a guest post by Murray Newlands. Murray is the CEO and Founder of Influence People, an online marketing and PR firm based in San Francisco. Influence People does blogger relations for a variety of clients, including Alerti.