2020 is a challenging year for all business owners. With COVID-19 pushing everyone indoors, it may seem ecommerce would skyrocket with people spending more time online. But the insecure job market has customers scared about the future. While some businesses experience a small decline revenue, others are at risk of closing forever.

Businesses cannot exist without customers. So what can brands do if consumers are less inclined to purchase?

The answer lies in micro marketing.

Micromarketing is an approach to advertising that tends to target a specific group of people in a niche market. With micromarketing, products or services are marketed directly to a targeted group of customers.

The intent is to specific go after those most likely to interact. Not only does this help strengthen brand identity and develop better relationships, but it’s also a great way to scale business in these trying times. In fact, micro marketing is helping brands improve customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and much more.

Using social media can significantly improve business results. Why is that? It’s because micro-marketing techniques involve narrowly defining the target audience by a particular characteristic. The includes factors like gender, job title, age, geography, preferences, etc.

Then, gear campaigns toward these specific groups. You should already use analytical tools that gather, analyze, and report essential metrics relevant to the brand. Once you have those metrics, you can define your ideal audience.

Once you do, it’s easier to incorporate micro-marketing techniques through social media.

The Effectiveness of Micro Marketing on Social Media

To get a better understanding of what micro marketing is, let’s look at campaigns by Coca Cola and Ford. Sure, these multinational companies have considerable ad budgets. They also use micro marketing techniques to facilitate growth.

Here are a few tips from Coke and Ford on how to employ micro marketing:

1. Pump Brand Loyalty

From the get-go, Coke built an image associated with joy and happiness. The brand also sets an example of how micro marketing can enhance brand loyalty.

Coca Cola remains one of the most vibrant, product-focused communities on Facebook. It’s no surprise everything the brand does on social media aligns with the fan-first philosophy. In fact, their social media presence serves as a hub dominated by the voice of consumers that support the brand’s marketing objectives. Coke encourages community-building activities. Consumers create, upload, consume, and comment on user-generated, brand-related content.

2. Optimize Emerging Innovations

Coca Cola continues to look for ways to maximize investments and grow profitability. That allows the company to grow. By collecting and analyzing consumer data, Coke produces research-based insights. More importantly, the company can then offer a unique appeal to specific customers or segments.

Coke invested in cashless payment vending solutions. This new, innovative option appeals to tech-savvy teens and millennials from a micro-market perspective. They nailed marketing to Gen Z and millennials which allows them to broaden their fanbase to this younger demographic.

The company also developed the Student Card Acceptance program aimed at college and university students. The cashless technology was introduced to accept payments from mobile payment solutions (Android Pay and Apple Pay), debit cards, and credit cards. Now, Coca Cola’s North America vending fleet has more than 100,000 vending machines that support this technology.

3. Leverage Data

Everything about your consumer is important. The evolution of consumer marketing makes data available to business owners. And since a large percentage is on social media, brands can utilize consumer data to identify purchasing trends and patterns. Businesses can accelerate growth and expand as opportunities arise.

Coca Cola knows the wealth of information hidden inside each transaction. From the time of day, to the type of payment, to additional products purchased. Recent data highlighted the highest percentage of beverage, meal, and snack sales is between 10am and 2pm.

More importantly, the brand identified when an average customer buys a sandwich and soft drink, there’s almost a 60% chance that she’ll buy chips. Micro marketing to incentivize the purchase of chips can help drive up sales. Moreover, exclusive deals can help boost sales during the lowest traffic times (2am to 6am). Hence, the marketing of midnight fast food deals that offer drink combos.

4. Enhance Customer Satisfaction

Businesses need to offer services and products that exceed customer expectations. Customer satisfaction is achieved when customer expectations of a product or service are met. To keep customers loyal, though, you must not only meet, but exceed expectations.

By incorporating micro marketing into your operations and activities, you can align you marketing efforts with a particular audience. Therefore, know what’s trending on social, from memes to music to videos. Recently, Coca Cola honed in on the fanfare and buzz surrounding Stranger Things.

Recognizing the power of micro marketing on social media, it brought in a ’80s makeover ahead of the new season. But in addition to the organic and paid social media activity, the brand took things to the next level. It partnered with Netflix and launched a Stranger Things-themed pop-up arcade in London. Not only did this allow fans to be a part of the launch, but it was also an excellent opportunity for user-generated content to be posted on the brand’s page.

5. Magnify Reach and Brand Awareness

The popularity of social media makes it an ideal platform for brands to create brand awareness. Used in the right way, businesses draw attention to their products, services, motives, promotional offers, etc. The most significant change has arrived with the help of micro-influencers.

Businesses can reap exceptional results by combining the power of brand ambassadors with the micro marketing. That’s precisely what Ford Motors did with the launch of its Ford Fiesta.

Instead of utilizing typical advertising to create a hype of their new model, the company loaned European-spec Fiestas to 100 young social media users for six months. These savvy influencers generated buzz about the automobile by telling stories on various social platforms, and spreading the word through peer-to-peer conservations.

With this non-traditional approach, Ford aligned the essence of the car with the general public. The Fiesta movement (as Ford called it) saw an exemplary amount of success over the six-month program. It delivered more than 10 million media impressions without a single dollar of paid media spend.

Ford garnered over a million YouTube video views, more than 3.7 million estimated Twitter impressions, and 740,000 Flickr photo views. Ford claimed brand-name recognition of the not-yet-available Fiesta reached 80%.

More importantly, there was an impressive increase in the brand’s interest when the next model was released. 97% of these people didn’t even drive a Ford at the time.

Final Thoughts

Any business can adopt micro marketing strategies. Many brands don’t need resources to get started. If you know how to integrate micro marketing into social media, you’re on the right track.

Micro marketing is an effective marketing tool that makes businesses more appealing to specific consumer segments. In 2020, that may be just what you need to stay on top of your game.