When compared to other forms of digital advertising, social media has proven to be the most effective in connecting businesses with their ideal customers. It’s no secret that accurate social media targeting features on major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube make this possible.
However, there is a caveat. Given that there are 3.78 billion active social media users, it’s not enough to simply create a social profile and hope that people, at random, will come across it and your offering. The best way to get the most out of social media is to locate your target audience and advertise directly to them where they spend the most time online. The success of your social media campaign depends on your ability to clearly define your intended audience.
If you want to get results from your social media efforts, this blog will show you how to find your target demographic. Knowledge gained includes:
Where to Look for Your Ideal Followers on Social Media
You can theoretically sell to anyone on social media, but you’ll get much better results and spend much less money if you target a specific demographic. In this section, you’ll learn how to find and communicate with your ideal clientele.
1. Use Marketing Personas
Conducting an analysis of your social media audience is the first step in developing an effective targeting strategy. There are two parts to this task, the first of which involves developing a social media persona in line with an existing buyer persona.
Your social media buyer persona should be regularly refreshed using the most up-to-date information from your marketing, sales, and support teams. Assess information like ages, sexes, levels of education, and income to get a better understanding of the population. Make sure to address their concerns and top priorities. Make use of any customer data you have at your disposal. Information like available funds would be useful to include.
Use what you’ve learned from persona marketing, but don’t pick a Facebook persona, Twitter persona, or anything else just yet.
2. Use Audience-Building Tools on Social Media
Insight-gathering tools like Google Analytics and native services like the Facebook or Instagram target audience insights tool make up the second part of your social media analysis.
Use Google Analytics to learn which social media sites are most popular with your current clientele and what information (product demo, benefit descriptions, etc.) they are looking for there.
Lookalike audiences can be made using data from the first step by plugging it into native platform tools. Use this strategy to zero in on the ideal demographic for your Facebook ad campaign.
3. Conduct surveys to add to persona marketing data.
You have probably formed a mental image of your ideal social media follower by now. Analysis of social media audiences, however, does not stop at large amounts of data. You can also conduct polls and surveys among your current clientele to learn more about their opinions and thoughts.
Incorporating the survey into an email marketing effort is a viable strategy. Your email’s goal should be to elicit responses that will tell you more about the social media platforms your recipients use and the types of content they find most interesting.
Once the results are in, you’ll have a better idea of what services are lacking and which social media platforms will be most beneficial to your company’s expansion.
4. Social Listening
Now, it’s time furthering your transformation from hypothetical to practical by having to spend time on social media. This is the place where you can get very specific (where and how to find your ideal customer on Facebook) as opposed to just talking about it in general terms (how to find your target audience on social media). Listening in on the conversations that your ideal customers are having on social media can help you develop a more complete profile of that audience.
You should also learn the intricacies of each social media platform. Brand conversations about hashtags and trending topics, for instance, are an important part of social listening that focuses on a Twitter audience. However, YouTube metrics such as comments, likes, and subscriptions can provide useful information about a video’s intended audience. Find a social media marketing agency that understands the intricacies of your desired platforms if you’re open to working with one.
5. Review the Market
Investigate the social media profiles of competing businesses. Do you know who their ideal customer is or how to reach them on social media? What kinds of content are they generating, and which ones are most successful?
Competitor research is a technique that allows you to analyse your competitors in the same industry by comparing their social media profiles. It gives you breathing room to observe when and why competitors are successful in engaging their social media audience. In essence, it helps you come up with new tactics to try.