In the first part of this series we covered how to determine your target market, or target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want to reach online — people who would ultimately buy your product or service. You can read part one here.
One of the main reasons to define your social media/content target audience is to be able to customize the content you’ll be publishing to capture the attention of prospective customers. The first sign of engagement is when a person reads and shares, likes or comments on your content. They become further engaged when they like or follow your business on one or more of your social media channels, or subscribe to your blog or newsletter. The more social media users interact by reading and sharing your content through likes, shares and comments, the more the likelihood they will convert from fans to customers.
Keep in mind this is a long-term investment. The purpose of social media and content marketing is to build trust between your business and your customer base. [ctt tweet=”http://ctt.ec/sfV05+ The purpose of social media and content marketing is to build trust between your business and your customer base.” coverup=”nj80Z”]And building trust takes time. But if you put the right amount of research and effort into it, it will pay off. A study by Nielsen and NM Incite shows that 60% of consumers researching products online learned about a particular brand or company through social media networking sites. Furthermore, consumers are more likely to make their purchasing decisions based on reviews and recommendations online, and often become loyal advocates for brands through social media.
Take Action
In this Take Action post we’ll drill down to define your target market, or audience, into segments. We’ll focus on certain characteristics, demographic and lifestyle traits such as gender, location, career, education, age, activities and interests.
This information will also help you find out where your target market spends time online for socializing, entertainment and shopping. It will also help determine the type content you should create, and how to target your social media and other marketing campaigns. If you use Google Adwords to market your business, this segmentation will help greatly in creating targeted ads.
Use the same spreadsheet or document you created during the first part of this series. Create columns or rows for each of the following questions.
Tip: Take a look at your existing customer base to help answer the questions below.
- Who needs your service or product? If you’re selling a special kind of cleaning cloth that collects dust and polishes furniture at the same time, the type of person more likely to be interested is an at-home mom/dad, individual housecleaner, or a cleaning business. This doesn’t mean other people, such as a student or career professional, would not be interested in your product. But who is more likely to be interested in a product that will help them make their cleaning tasks easier?
- Who can afford your product or service?
- What age and gender is your ideal customer?
- What is their profession, household size? What stage are they in their family life cycle (newly married, young children, empty nest)?
- What stage are they in their business/profession?
- Where does your ideal customer live or have their business?
- What leisure/hobby activities interest your ideal customer?
- What are their values, beliefs, attitudes? The answer to these questions can be referred to as a “psychographic profile.” You are dealing with people who have likes and dislikes, watch certain shows, do sports or go to the opera. If you have current customers that you talk to on a friendly basis, or your employees do, what do they talk about?
- What problem can you help your prospective customers overcome? This reflects question 2 in the first part of the series (which you can read here), but now that you know your target market or audience better, you might be able to refine the answer even more.
Now that we have a better idea of who your ideal audience or customer is, we can now find out where they spend their time online. Our next Take Action post will cover how to find out where your customer base socializes.
Each week we’ll be posting social media and content marketing tips, advice and answers, as well as a simple action for you to take and keep on top of your social media and content management.
Have a burning question about social media or content marketing? Send it to us below and we’ll give you an answer!
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