INSIGHTS
General Electric, which has an exemplary social media strategy, make posts about their employees and philanthropies to increase engagement.
L.L.Bean uses web analytics to create customer profiles based on patterns in how customers view and buy products.
Coca-Cola uses location data from internet-connected vending machines to see which products are most popular in that region.

In micro-targeting, businesses use consumer data and demographics so they can target specific individuals based on their interests. Even though social media companies like Facebook have made micro-targeting easy and accessible to even businesses with small budgets, there are certain practices that some businesses do better than others. The best practices we’ve compiled in micro-targeting are: monitor social media activity, monitor web analytics, track users’ location, contextuale data and use predictive analysis. We go into further detail below.

MONITOR SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITY
When businesses monitor the social media activity of their page and their subscribers/followers, businesses can get a glimpse into how their users view and interact with their business. Businesses can monitor how people engage on their posts about their products and services, and they can monitor lifestyle posts as well which tell a story about the company or their users. These kinds of posts are more effective at emotionally engaging users. Not only should businesses monitor how people interact with their own pages, but they should also monitor how they interact with the pages of their competition. General Electric is one company that effectively uses social media. Aside from talking about their products, they also talk about their employees and innovations and how they are helping the community.

MONITOR WEB ANALYTICS
Web analytics enables website owners to see how people are interacting on their webpages. This data enables businesses to see what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong, and from this they can correct underperforming areas and create marketing campaigns to target certain users based on behavior. Epson uses web analytics to find out how effective their marketing strategies are. General Electric is just as effective with how they monitor their web analytics as they are with their social media, where they use this data to see which products are the most viewed on any of their webpages. Another example is L.L.Bean, which uses web analytics to pick out patterns in how customers view and buy products, and from that create customer profiles which helps them further target certain customers.

TRACK USERS’ LOCATION
Each smartphone has a GPS installed which lets the phone know where in the world it is. Locations can also be tracked with Wi-Fi and IP addresses. Targeting users based on where they are is very smart because businesses can physically guide their customer to the product or service they offer that is nearby. They can also see how close their users are to their competition. Coca-Cola uses location data from internet-connected vending machines to see what products are most popular in that region.

CONTEXTUALIZE DATA
Businesses today have countless avenues to collect data which they can use to analyze behavioral patterns of customers. But because of the myriad of ways to get data, the data received can be very disorganized and unreadable. Big Data is all about how companies manage mountains of data, and they hire specialists like data scientists to figure out what the data is saying for the company. These specialists contextualize the data using multiple data endpoints to plot and make graphs, charts and multiple other ways to display data analyses. Apple collects data from their 450 stores in the US and their multiple software distribution platforms to determine how they should design and craft their products. Their aim in doing this is to have their products easy to use by anyone and to get customers to revisit the store for all their Apple needs.

USE PREDICTIVE ANALYSIS
Predictive analysis allows businesses to take data that shows what customers want now to predict what customers will want in the future. This helps to create a personalized experience so that customers stick with these businesses, which eventually means consistent revenue for that business. One company that does this is Target, where they use an app called Cartwheel that analyzes customers' recent purchases and location of the customer. With this data Target can implement sales strategies, make discounts and create promotions based on what they believe customers will want and like in the future. It is estimated that Cartwheel increased Target’s revenue by 30% in 2017.