Mid-February is an interesting time of the year. The stores, malls, and grocery stores are jam-packed with people shopping for Valentines Day. If you like to shop, this may be paradise… heading out with all of the other crazed shoppers, trying to find that one special thing for that special someone. But if you're not into shopping, you probably want to minimize the places you have to go.
Imagine if you only gave yourself one opportunity to find that special gift—you're determined to go to only one store. Some of you would get lucky. Others might find that is it out of stock, while others find that the one store chosen never even carried that special something. So what do you do if you weren’t lucky? Since you only gave yourself one shot, you have two options—find another gift or go home with no gift.
Don’t like those options? Me either, but when it comes to digital marketing, I see salespeople and marketers do just that all the time when using ad targeting to reach their target consumer—their someone special if you will. Instead of using multiple targeting options available to them, they make the decision to hyper-target… using just one behavior, age group, or a small geographic area. Doing that is the same thing as just going into one store to find your target gift. You might get lucky and generate results, but more often hyper targeting minimizes your chances to deliver results.
As Social Media continues to mature, they continue to search for new ways to engage consumers and drive revenue. Two weeks ago, Pinterest and Instagram introduced similar features aimed at accomplishing both goals and these new options could be game changers for businesses and consumers.
My three-year-old grandson led me to a meaningful epiphany recently. We were sitting at the kitchen table playing with some Play-Doh when he watched me sink my thumb into a small ball of the clay. He pointed to my thumbprint and asked, “What’s that?”
As a former Digital Sales Manager turned consultant, I am constantly asked How can I make sure this social media campaign will work? As with any campaign, there’s plenty a marketer needs to do to maximize success. But there’s one thing that’s enormously impactful and often overlooked:
A few years ago, 
A few nights before the Super Bowl, we were all gathered around the dinner table, discussing the upcoming “big game.” My daughter suggested that the Super Bowl should be a national holiday. I asked why and she said, “It happens every year no matter what, everyone pays attention, even if they don’t like football, because they want to see the commercials, and we watch the whole game just for the commercials. So we should get the day off of school, making it a holiday!”
Prior to the holidays, the trades were publishing articles and digital pundits were posting blogs on what they felt would happen at the digital cash register over the largest consumer purchasing time of year. Many exploited Target’s and Home Depot's infamous 2014 data breaches in predicting that these chains would experience the worst holiday retail season ever, citing lack of consumer confidence in identity protection as the reason why.
