14 Nov Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Sneak Peek #3
Today we are continuing the sneak peek series from our new book Social Media is a Cocktail Party: Why You Already Know the Rules of Social Media Marketing that is scheduled to launch on November 20th.
This Sneak Peek #3 is from a section in the book titled “Social Media as a Segmentation Tool”, nestled within Chapter 2 of the book, “What is Social Media?”. This section of the book argues that the value of using social media can go beyond marketing
and into actual segmentation of audiences based on demographic and psychographic data. Below is a clip from this section:
“Social media is, unbeknownst to many of its users, the largest, best, most accurate market segmentation tool ever invented. Whatever you sell – from cars to cancer drugs, consulting services to machinery – there are groups out there talking online about your category.
I worked with a company doing fascinating work in the pharmaceutical industry. They were literally inventing things that would help reduce suffering in people with a certain series of diseases. This was a tremendous opportunity for social media – people with medical conditions are voracious in their searching of the Internet for new information.
Unfortunately, rather than engage in these myriad conversations affordably, the company decided to “build their brand” by hiring six to eight sales representatives to make calls on doctors. This likely continues to cost the company upwards of a million dollars per year. While sales representatives in the pharmaceutical industry are standard practice, they are also seeing diminishing returns due to saturation, and there’s ample evidence that shows that doctors are notoriously slow adopters.
Even a quarter of this investment put into social media could have vaulted the company into the forefront of this emerging category among patients in their categories. Patients would then go to their doctors asking for these exciting new treatments.
This sort of voluntary segmentation is occurring in your industry, too. With the right social media strategy, a bit of patience and resources, you can effectively engage in the conversation that is currently taking place without you.”
Do you have any examples of how you’ve used social media to segment your audiences? Please share in the comments below!
