You've got your social media strategy outlined, aligned and implemented - Check.

You've got your target audience defined and identified -Check.

But now comes the hard part: forging ahead of your competition, the elusive goal of marketing.

In 2016, this is achievable but not without careful strategizing and deliberate planning with regards to social ad targeting. At agency:2, we believe that implementing generic social ad targeting is not enough; it must now be fine-tuned and optimized for efficacy. Enhanced social ad targeting uses a collection of enriched, real-time social data to help you reach larger, more relevant, more precise audiences, who are more likely to engage.

A recent report revealed that Facebook ad spend has more than doubled, year-over-year. This illustrates both the growing challenge of a crowded marketplace as well as the necessity to participate in this form of social media marketing to stay competitive.

How does one put social ad targeting into practice?

The most effective way of hyper-targeting through social advertising is becoming increasingly dependent upon using Audience Insights to:

Connect with a fan's emotional side

Understand an audience's motivations and drives toward purchasing

Engage with the audience's wider interests to spark a connection

Break through the extensive noise of internet traffic and create meaningful associations

It is no longer sufficient to simply get people to 'Like' your brand. Marketers have to be smarter than ever and comprehensively understand their brand's customer habits, beliefs and personal buying preferences, as laid out above.

It's also imperative when targeting to be hyperaware of who to proactively exclude - by excluding the right audience, negative sentiment can be kept to a minimum to elevate your campaign beyond expectations.

We have seen an unparalleled rate of growth of innovation, with new technologies evolving at a faster pace than ever before. Not only do marketers have to keep pace, but they now need to anticipate what's next. Rather than focusing exclusively on ROI for current campaigns, marketers need to monitor the cost per engagement in real time, and integrate data-driven, quantifiable components of user journeys to provide more definable, actionable insights.

Combining these tricks of the trade to hyper-target a defined audience will not only facilitate growth in reach, but it'll also reduce the cost per action.

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