Guest Post: Khayree Billingslea, the Sales & Marketing Intern at local digital marketing agency and founding AZIMA Member, Terralever.
Marty Weintraub, author of “Killer Facebook Ads” and CEO of aimClear online marketing, has a lot to say about how Facebook has a lot to say about you. Weintraub’s insights constitute a departure from conventional application of paid-organic advertising on the social media behemoth—instead of targeting key demographics, constructing personas (or a ) and driving ads to their Facebook pages, use user data from their Facebook interests to set retargeting cookies which drive ads to many other sites.
Industry thinkers who claim to have uncovered a way of thinking about digital media that “revolutionizes” or “redefines” the way the media landscape will be navigated for the next five or so years are dime-a-dozen. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to sort out stale reiterations of old concepts from the truly new strategic developments. In the digital space, a field in which the ground is daily shifting beneath the feet of the media experts who dare to attain some mastery over it, Marty Weintraub has made his expeditions through the wilderness and it just happens that he is an excellent cartographer who keeps his ear to the proverbial railroad tracks.
For Mr. Weintraub, key consumer insights come from utilizing user-provided data. That data can be used to model what he calls “personas”. A persona is an amalgam of interests, often particular to a member of one or another niche market, likely to be published on a social media platform. It is the advertiser’s responsibility to take advantage of the targeting tools at their disposal. If you master persona modeling—that is, if you come to learn the resonance frequency of high volume targeting terms—Weintruab claims, the precision of your messages will increase drastically. The goal at the end the targeting process is to consistently send out advertisements tuned to the needs of a very small, well-understood, audience. In a sense, his technique turns your online marketing strategy into something akin to a more-or-less benign CIA operation that predator drone strikes offers into the web browsers of consumers.
It is also worth Marty’s unconventional style; never once did a dull moment of technically sophisticated discourse escape vindication via his playfulness and wit. A whirling tornado of activity and apparent ecstasy at having been so lucky as to find a job he truly loves, Weintraub is an absolute joy to watch. If you missed it, take a look at the Marty’s AZIMA presentation shared on aimclear’s Facebook page.