Social media marketing can be a bit of a funny old game. While you can very quickly connect with literally hundreds and thousands of new followers, there is no guarantee that any of them will actually be the type to actively engage with your brand, nor indeed buy your product. As such, you may well already be enjoying a huge social following across your various accounts, but, for some reason this mass fan base is not translating into the amount of conversions that the promising figures suggest.
The problem is, of course, that you aren’t connecting with the right customers. But, don’t worry. All is not lost. There are in fact a number of things that you can quite easily do in order to start reaching out to the ones that will really make a difference to your engagement levels, your conversion rates, and ultimately your sales.
All it takes is a little bit of detective work, and pretty soon you will be able to determine firstly exactly whom it is that you want to reach, and then from there you can begin putting together a strategy for how you can start engaging with them across all of your social media platforms.
Creating Buyer Persona’s
Creating buyer persona’s
is an absolutely essential part of marketing in all of its variations – be it on social media or more traditional terrain. The idea is that you want to clearly define your target audience and customers, and from there you can market to them much more enticingly.
So, ask yourself – what type of people do you normally do business with? Where do they live? How old are they? Do you appeal to one gender more than another? What do they look like?
If you have more than one target demographic in mind, then that’s ok. Just make sure that you do everything twice (or three times, or however many times that you need, just so long as you create a very specific persona for each of them).
Once you’ve got your list of persona’s drawn up and completed, now it’s time to turn to your fan and follower lists on your social networks, and start seeing if any of your newly created buyer persona’s match any of your existing followers. A very quick way of doing this is to turn to Facebook insights (or your other social media analytics boards), where you will be presented with some visually represented statistics, giving you the low down on your existing fan base.
Let’s think of an example. So, you’re a company that sells football boots. By turning to your social media analytics you discover that there are three main customer profiles with whom you do the most business:
· Young male footballers, age 14-25, who are fans of football and share all the latest gossip from the dressing rooms on their social walls.
· Young female footballers, age 14–25, who are dedicated to the sport and in particular are following the female leagues on their social channels.
· Mums and dads aged 35-55 who are buying football boots for their children.
Perhaps surprisingly, when it comes to something like this, you may well find that it is in fact the mums and dads who are giving you the most business, rather than either of the demographics who are actually using your products. This means that you will need to make some adjustments in your social media campaigns to start appealing more to those who are actually the ones who are parting with hard cash and keeping your business alive.
Find Out When Your Target Customers Access Their Social Media Accounts
This is imperative. People’s lifestyles, habits, interests and work schedules all influence when they actually find the time to start using their social media accounts. By understanding what those influences are, you can start to schedule your posts, so you know that you will have a better chance of reaching the people that you want.
Soccer mums and dads will probably be most active on social media in the evenings (though don’t take my word for this – if you’re selling football boots or other sports equipment then you need to head over to your analytics and check the facts for yourself. But, for the sake of the example, I will continue…). Therefore that is when you should be scheduling any new deals, offers or content to go live. People won’t spend the time scrolling right the way back through their news feed to see something that you posted at 2 o’clock in the morning, so try and get them when they’re most likely to be online, and you’ll find your engagement and sales improving.
It’s All About Research
Gaining meaningful insight into where to look for ideal customers on social media in the end just comes down to taking the time to do a little research and scour your analytics for demographic patters. Once you’ve found them, you will then of course be able to more readily find more and more. Who are your best customers friends with? Who are the biggest influencers that they all follow on Twitter? Who else follows these influencers? Once you’ve identified these people, then start following all of them, and you’ll soon have for yourself a more meaningful audience across your social networks, who will be more likely to engage and do business with you.
Kerry Butters
Kerry is a published author and writer on all things tech, corporate tech, data centres, SEO, webdesign & more for some of the world’s leading sites.