Use Your Audience to Decide Your Social Media Strategy
Social media marketing is a very powerful, and cost-effective, method of driving potential customers into your sales funnel. However, social media is not inherently a marketing tool. No one gets on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube because they want to be marketed too. This means that there are very strict guidelines that need to be followed when launching a social media marketing campaign or things can go very wrong. One of the most important of these guidelines is using your audience to decide your social media strategy.
Finding Your Demographic
To build a social media following, you must first know where your demographic is hanging out online. Failing to do this can result in a social media marketing campaign that doesn’t connect with your target audience. For example, Facebook is now mostly made up of people 25 to 35 years old. This means that if you were trying to market a video game aimed at teens, running ads on Facebook may not be the best strategy.
Instead, you want to make sure that you’re doing in-depth demographics research so that you know exactly who your target audience is. Factors like age, income, gender, and interests are all important. Location can also be a very important factor as well, especially if your business operations are limited to a specific area. Once you know who your target audience is and where they are, you can begin setting up social media accounts and reaching out to them.
Multi-Layered Platforms
Something else to keep in mind is that some social media sites are multi-layered. A good example of this would be Reddit which is made up of many subreddits which are specific sections/forums within the site itself that cater to different interests. Similarly, Facebook has many fan pages and chat groups where people come together to share common interests. Even YouTube is divided into several parts with the main two being normal YouTube and YouTube Kids.
Once again, figuring out which of these channels you use depends on where your demographic is, and what they’re doing. In most cases, it is best to create your own subreddit or Facebook page so that you have complete control over your campaign. Even so, posting on other pages can lead traffic back to your own, and help you to appear as a more prominent member of the community. Just be aware that every single post you make reflects on your brand one way or another so always think twice before posting.
Branding Your Business
Social media is arguably the best branding tool in the history of marketing. Using social media you can give your business a “face,” and show your target audience your brand personality. This makes it much easier to connect with your demographic on a deeper level that will turn followers into customers and customers into fans eager to promote your brand.
The way you present your brand on social media depends on your demographic. You want to simultaneously appear to be “one of the group,” but also position your brand as a subject matter expert and voice authority. For example, a small business that trains dogs would want to present themselves as a passionate dog owner, but also an expert on dog training.
Having the Right Opinions
People are extremely opinionated on social media and this can work to your advantage. When running a social media campaign, you should try to avoid posting anything that your demographic would consider controversial. Don’t rock the boat. Instead, just tell your followers what they want to hear. People don’t care about the truth; they just want to feel like they’re right. By creating an echo chamber you’re able to better connect with your demographic so that you can gain their trust and loyalty. As you can imagine, a trusting and loyal audience is much easier to nudge into your sales funnel than one that is suspicious or distrustful of you.
Encourage Engagement
Another key to connecting with your social media audience is engagement. This is basically just a description of how your followers interact with your brand. For example, if you make a tweet and your followers retweet or reply to it, that’s a form of engagement. It should be noted, however, that images and video are much better forms of engagement than just raw text.
In any case, the key is making your followers feel like their interactions with your brand are meaningful. You can do this by pinning, highlighting, or retweeting comments from your followers that support your brand, hosting polls for your followers to vote in, and even responding directly to your followers on occasion.
How you engage with your target audience depends on what type of engagement they’re most receptive to. Just remember that the true power of engagement is that it makes your followers feel invested in your brand. The more invested your followers feel, the more likely they will respond positively when you nudge them towards your sales funnel.
Turning Followers into Paying Customers
This is the entire point of running a social media campaign in most cases, and it can be tricky. As previously mentioned, people don’t get on social media to be marketed to or to buy stuff. This being the case, making offers or running promotions on social media can backfire if done incorrectly.
One trick to circumvent this issue is to present offers in a context of exclusivity. Make it seem like you’re doing your followers a favor. If they feel that your offer is a reward for their loyalty and dedication to your brand, then your followers will be much more receptive to it.
Optimizing Your Campaign Based on Feedback
Remember, knowing who your target audience will determine what methods of marketing they’re most receptive to and what offers will work best. If an offer doesn’t go well, you’ll get plenty of feedback on why it failed from your followers. Make sure that you listen to your followers to get a better understanding of how they think. Every group of followers is different, and by listening to yours you can optimize your social media marketing strategy based on their feedback for better results.
Categorized in: Social Media
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