What Does Your Social Media Target Look Like?
What Does Your Social Media Target Look Like?
Digital and Mobile marketing is the fastest growing media for advertisers and everyone’s working tirelessly to refine their online presence, implement their social media marketing plans and generate new business. But are they skipping the first and most important step?
Much emphasis is placed on identifying and implementing the right key words in digital marketing efforts, which is critical, but equally important, is understanding which social media channels your target market is engaging with, how they spend their time online and how they consume (read, watch, play) content. The most meaningful content that’s packed with the most strategic key words won’t be effective if it’s not reaching your target market.
Putting a Face on your Target Market
The first step in identifying your target market is to talk to your existing customers. Simply ask them some questions such as: What is your favorite social media site? Do you prefer Videos, Articles or Infographics? Your existing customers, particularly your most profitable and ideal customers, are a window into the characteristics of your target audience.
Another way to understand their digital personas is to examine their online profiles. Are they more active on Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or Instagram? Who and what they do follow? What type of posts have they liked or shared? What kind of groups are they in? All of this information is readily available on their profiles. Once you review a dozen or more of these profiles, you should be able to identify patterns in their behavior and similarities in their engagements, and you can start to build a target market persona.
Test your Social Media Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve got what you think is a solid understanding of your target’s digital behavior, choose one Social Media Site to test your assumptions. If you’ve discovered that your target market spends the bulk of their time watching videos, for example, then invest some time and money in creating a few entertaining videos that promote your key words and address their pain points, and then promote them heavily. Alternatively, if your target market loves to tweet, then become an expert on re-tweeting and hashtags and focus on building up your company’s Twitter’s presence.
When it comes to digital marketing, a lot of time and energy can be wasted by blogging and posting content that will never reach your target market, but there are a wealth of tools available to help you identify your key words and gain customer insights that will help you invest your time and money more efficiently and build an effective social media marketing strategy.