In the modern digital landscape, social media has become the most important tool of inter-sectoral marketing. Not only does it help businesses increase their inbound traffic, but it also enables them to generate specific leads, enhance conversion rates, and improve brand loyalty. This is why over 73% of marketers across the world believe that developing a competent and sound social media marketing strategy can prove to be extremely effective for their business!
If you too are willing to employ social networks for engaging your prospective customers, here are a few quick tips to help you find and reach your target audience on social media in a smart, perceptive, and efficient way –
Identify Your Ideal Customer
Of the 3 billion people who currently use social networks, identify who your social media target audience really is. Develop a fictional profile of this potential audience based on distinctive questions like:
- What gender do they belong to?
- Which age cohort do they fall in?
- What is their average income?
- What do they like or dislike?
- What are their needs & preferences?
Carving out a detailed persona of your ideal customers won’t just help you locate them on social media, but it would also equip you to prioritize and focus your marketing efforts.
Use Data To Determine Your Target Market
A social media marketing strategy is incomplete if it isn’t backed by solid data sets. In fact, collecting adequate data is a must for optimizing social campaigns and boosting promotional opportunities.
So, start with easily available tools like Facebook ads to reach your target audience on social media. Apart from being a place for product/service promotion, Facebook ads are also the best medium to get a clear idea about the exact nature of your target audience, their location, extent, and size.
Use this data to determine your target market and narrow it down within your specific niche.
Research Online Behavior
Being aware of the online behavior of your target audience will enable you to productively increase engagement on social media.
Start with surveying your audience to determine where in the digital space, they generally hang out. Do they prefer browsing websites, reading blogs or listening to podcasts? Which influencers do they tend to follow?
Whether you are just starting a new business or expanding into a greenfield territory, well-researched answers to queries like these will certainly help you bridge gaps, build bonds, and thus engage your customer base meaningfully.
Find and Connect With Your Customers on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter
In order to reach your target audience on social media, you will first need to find and connect with your ideal customers on popular social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The good news is that you can actually upload your entire e-mail database on each one of these networks and get in touch with your customers almost instantly!
Furthermore, these platforms also allow you to identify your social media target audience by:
- Creating a custom audience with Facebook Ads manager
- Designing a ‘lookalike audience’ that harbors similar character traits
- Applying extensive filters to improve search results
- Employing Twitter ads to get more followers interested in your niche
- Targeting audience based on what they are tweeting about
- Creating Twitter lists and engaging influencers to increase visibility
- Using LinkedIn search tools to narrow down your prospecting process
- Initiating personal connections with interested people with InMail
- Developing LinkedIn groups to bring all audience members onboard
Benefits Of Using Paid Advertising
With 37% of online shoppers using social media for purchase inspiration, the importance of paid advertising within the social network architecture cannot be overstated.
Paid advertising can go a long way in strengthening your social media marketing strategy by:
- Ensuring that your place in the user feed is secured
- Amplifying your reach by letting you engage with niche markets
- Giving you complete control over who can or cannot view your ad
- Enhancing your brand awareness, authority, and credibility
- Providing better analytics and greater market insights
Using paid advertising will automatically help you locate and reach your target audience on social media with absolute simplicity and ease.
Tailor Content for Your Target Audience
Last but not least, begin focusing entirely on your target audience by curating a well-balanced social media content strategy for them.
Create at least one piece of engaging content every day. Promote your product/service, but do not overload your customers with needless information. Tailor your content in accordance with the specific requirements of your social media target audience. Make sure that this content is adequately personalized and diversified. Use a wide variety of posts like videos, audios, polls, infographics, inspirational quotes, and educational blogs to attract your audience.
Don’t concentrate on being a mere seller. Instead, work on building sustainable relationships.
Wrapping Up
As times change, more and more organizations will increasingly begin to craft a comprehensive social media marketing strategy in order to easily target, connect and engage with their potential customers. This will require them to focus almost exclusively on their social media target audience, with the primary aim of providing dynamic, substantial & relevant content. In such a scenario, network-driven and goal-oriented marketing efforts will remain the only way to pique consumer interest, channelize online interactions & create lasting B2C bonds.
To know more about how to find and reach your target audience on social media, click here.