Social media marketing is a difficult balance between creating content that attracts your target market, creating general brand awareness and presence within your industry, and converting followers into paying customers.
Businesses use social media to achieve all of these goals and more, often times across multiple channels at the same time, which is not an easy task. It’s even more difficult if your channels have been going for a while and you’ve picked up the “wrong” audience.
So how do you ensure that your social media follow is full of your target market?
Create a Hub for your Target Market
The easiest method to ensure that your social media marketing efforts are attracting the right people is to turn your channels into a hub for your target market. This is an especially neat trick if you’re only selling or promoting 1 product / service however the fundamentals can be applied to any business.
You want your social media channels to be a place where your customers will “hang out” or regularly check for their own purposes. A great example for this would be Halibo Orange who sell health supplements / vitamins for young children. They’ve focused their social media efforts on creating a hub for parents of young children who they then occasionally sell to.
The majority of their posts offer advice for creating healthy snacks, packed lunches, and even videos that are intended to be shown to a child (such as how to make friends at school). This encourages parents to follow their page for the valuable information, and likely even share the page with other parents, and then puts them in a prime position to see the sales posts about the actual products. They’re also likely to be a warmer lead since they also have an attachment to the brand.
This method is quite simple to set up, allows for a range of content ideas to be explored, and has massive returns in the long run.
How to Find your Target Audience on Social Media
There are 3 steps to finding your target audience on social media and then creating a social media strategy to attract them to your page. All these require is a bit of manual work and some thinking.
Create Buyer Personas for your Customers
A buyer persona is a detailed analysis on who your customers are. This includes their fears, buying habits, lifestyle choices, and more. They’re the foundation of almost all marketing and can be used to created targeted content, both paid and organic, that attracts your target audience.
To create a buyer persona, I suggest starting with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis of your products / your business as a whole. The typical advice is to look through who’s engaged with your / your competitors social media and then deduct as much as you can from their profile, however if you’re not great at analysis then starting with your own product is best way to go. Focus on uncovering your negatives (weaknesses and threats) because then you can build a social media strategy that negates them.
For example, Halibo Oranges weakness would likely be that they don’t offer many products, so they’ve overcome this by focusing on content for parents instead. This allows them to create content around a variety of topics which helps expand their reach.
Another example would be within the home improvement / décor space where the target market is typically people who have homes (and, by extension, are likely parents too) which means they have monthly expenses and money would be a concern. You can negate this worry about money by displaying the price of an item within the social media post (meaning that anyone who clicks through to a website to find out more about the product is likely already considering buying).
Analyse your Competitors Social Media
After you’ve completed a SWOT analysis on your own product / business, you’ll have some idea for what issues your direct competitors (those offering the same products / services as you) are facing. You can use this information to see how they’re overcoming their challenges and to get some inspiration.
Analysing your competitors social media marketing can be difficult because it requires a lot of theory, and your first few theories will often be incorrect. In fact, scientists say that the phrase “put yourself in their shoes” is actually bad advice, and you should instead “see their perspective”. This is because we often attach our own emotions and experiences onto others when we analyse them (what would WE do in that situation) instead of taking their circumstances into account. We can get around this when it comes to social media marketing by having a deep understanding of the product / service that a competitor is offering and using that as a foundation for their perspective.
When we take this into consideration, we’re analysing their methods for handling the information from their SWOT analysis, which is much easier to measure and leads to more accurate predictions. Think of everything you see as an idea or attempt that they’re trying. The goal is to then figure out what worked / didn’t work, why the attempt had that out, and then develop your own strategies using those lessons.
Here are some key tips for when performing a competitor analysis:
- Look at their content with the most engagement and take note of everything that you can see (such as vibe, what the post is trying to do (sell / inform / promote the brand), is the price included, etc)
- After viewing a post, create a theory and then see if that theory is true across other posts (such as video post that are fast and energetic get more engagement)
- Make notes about everything, you’ll often look back at these notes and learn new things / develop your own strategies
- Look at what hashtags a post is using, or a page uses for most of their posts. This will give you a deep insight into who they’re targeting
Manually Check Groups / Pages on Social Media
After performing a buyer persona, you might be able to uncover more information (or even shatter everything you previously deducted) by manually looking through social media to see where your target market actually is.
For example, if we take the home improvement persona, then we might assume that they follow pages that share beautiful vases or layouts of rooms. In my experience, this isn’t true since these pages often display luxurious items that are completely out of a customer’s price range and most customers are only interested in improvement out of a necessarily (such as they need a new sofa). Whilst this is a logical deduction, it falls apart in the real world which makes it useless for a social media marketing strategy.
To see if your target audience is actually on a page, look through who engages with posts. If it’s Instagram or Tik Tok, then you can see the names of anyone who comments, and their name will show if they’re a business or professional (self-employed). If their name isn’t anything of noteworthy, then looking through their profile will tell you a bit more. You do need to use some stereotyping here to get results, such as younger people won’t have as much money or older people won’t know how the internet works, but all of this will help develop your buyer persona.
For platforms that allow you to see who’s liked a post, go through the profiles of about 10 likers. These people generally have a stronger connection to the page than commenters, who often have their own agenda, and are therefore more likely to purchase.
How to Create a Hub for your Social Media Target Market
Once you know who your target market is you can begin turning your social media channels into a place where they want to be.
Start by creating content pillars / trees around topics that your target audience would be interested in. For example, if we take the home improvement persona then we could say they’d be interested in cleaning tips and making their home look good. You could share informative content around hacks for cleaning behind the fridge etc to attract this audience. Try to think of at least 3 or 4 ideas so your content remains interesting.
Then create and post this content frequently with some sales stuff in between. This takes some trail and error to discover what the best mix of sales vs non-sales is but that only takes around 2 weeks to find out.
You can use social media stories to share smaller pieces of content that don’t stand on their own (such as quotes or pieces of advice), and you can even post the majority of your sales content in stories too. This has a higher chance of conversion, but you do need to spend more time working on the graphics (adding instructions for next steps, fitting all the important information in, making it look good and not too busy, etc)
Overview
- Figure out who your target market are through creating buyer personas
- Analyse your competitors to get inspiration and ideas
- Turn your social media into a hub for your target market by sharing content that is of value to them
