But it’s not just about breadth – it’s also about depth.
That is to say that it’s not just about how many people you can reach, but also how precisely targeted those people are. If you set out to create something for ‘everyone’, then you will simultaneously create something for no-one.
If you know who your perfect customer is, then you can make sure that you invest all your time, effort and budget into reaching those people – and the result will be far more profitable and far more rewarding.
Remember – if you have no specific target for your business it also means you have no USP / UVP too.
It is best if you think of your social media accounts as products. Like any product, it needs to offer value. Like any product, it needs a USP and like any product, it needs an ideal customer.
EXAMPLE: If your website is called ‘BurnFat.Com’ then it’s going to be competing with every single other fitness site on the net and it gives your visitors no real reason to read it – it doesn’t offer anything over and above all the other content they’ve seen so often.
But the worst offender of all? It’s not exciting and it doesn’t evoke emotion and this is super important because your content needs to be exciting to be successful.
That’s because it is emotion that drives action to call you and ask for a carpet clean – not logic.
This is why clickbait works so well – because it is controversial, or mysterious, or absurd. Even people who know and hate clickbait will often click it just to see ‘how much they hate it’.
If you are safe and vanilla, then you give people no reason to promote your content.
What’s more, sharing your content on Facebook or Twitter works FAR better if your content is for a specific person. For starters, knowing your precise target audience will give you places to market and a person to aim for and it will allow you to avoid lots of competition.
Targeting and Sharing
Another reason to focus is that the very psychology of sharing is pretty much reliant on targeting.
Why?
Because ultimately, sharing is a social act.
Social media is social – even though this is something a lot of brands forget – and pretty much everything we do on those platforms is social as well. When you share something on Facebook, you are sharing something because you either want to communicate with the person you’re talking to, or because you want to say something about yourself.
Targeting and Selling
If the ultimate goal of your social media campaign is to make money (which is the case for a great many people) then you should absolutely ensure that your channel is highly targeted. For instance, if you own a business that sells wedding dresses, then you can spend a whole lot of money marketing to everyone and see very little ROI.
Only a very small section of the population is looking for a wedding dress right now! BUT if you target only engaged women in your area, then suddenly you are focusing all of your efforts and all of your marketing budget on just the kind of person who is likely to buy from you.
This is exactly the sort of mentality you need to adopt with your carpet cleaning business.
How to Target Your Social Media Campaign
So, with that in mind, how do you go about targeting your social media campaign? Here are some crucial pointers to get you started…
Create Your Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a concept used in business that describes who the ideal customer is.
This is the person who, on paper, is most likely to buy from you, most likely to like and share your posts and most likely to become highly engaged with what you’re doing. A buyer person is often written like a fictional biography – as though you were creating a fictional character for a movie script. That means that you’re going to take into account their age, their sex and their gender… but you’ll also go one step further than this by asking yourself what their hobbies and interests might be, where they are likely to spend their time and what job they are likely to have.
Now picture this person as a real live person. You might even be able to base it on someone you know. Give them a name. Let’s call the Joe. And from now on, every single social media post you make, ask yourself this question: would Joe like this?
If you think it would be right up their street and they’d be likely to hit like and share – then it passes. Otherwise, it’s back to the drawing board!
Of course, this is guess work to a certain extent though, so make sure that you are also looking at the stats and consider surveying your audience as well.
Use PPC
If you have any advertising budget for your social campaign, then it could be worth driving a little of this into PPC.
PPC is ‘Pay Per Click’, which is a form of marketing where – you guessed it – you pay each time someone clicks on one of your adverts.
There are two big PPC networks, which are Google’s AdWords and Facebook Ads. AdWords shows ads on Google searches, which allows you to target by knowing what sort of thing someone who is looking for your brand would be likely to search for.
But what we’re most interested in is Facebook ads. Facebooks ads allow you to target your audience based on their hobbies and interests, on their age, on their sex and their location.
In short, any information that a user gives to Facebook can now be used to reach them and to market to them directly. So, for our wedding dress shop for example, we could pay only for adverts to appear on the walls of women who are engaged. In this example it is likely that the majority of clicks would lead to a sale.
This is immensely effective especially if you use CPA which is ‘Cost Per Action’.
Facebook allows you to set up your ads so that you only pay if someone actually likes your Facebook page! That makes a massive difference too because now you’re only paying when you genuinely increase your following with a highly targeted follower!
Find Communities
A ‘route to market’ is any platform that allows you to communicate specifically with your buyer persona. In the case of social media, that often means online communities.
These can include Facebook pages or Google Plus Communities.
Either way, these are places where people with a specific interest will hang out and where you will be able to converse with them and likely post your content for free. Now that audience is seeing the content you created and every member should be targeted as a matter of fact.
Consider Your Branding
Branding is absolutely fundamental to any successful social media campaign, and it’s a subject that we return to numerous times over the course of these 8 steps. It is also very relevant here and the objective in this case is to create a brand that is clearly specifically tailored to your target audience.
In other words, when you come up with your logo and your tagline you should think carefully about who you are aiming at and what you do and then make sure that you convey it all consistently.
The ideal scenario is that someone sees some of your content or one of your social media posts and finds it interesting. Then they look at your brand and they know instantly what kind of content they can expect and whether or not it is for them.
For the right kind of person, your brand should look and feel as though it was created entirely for them because in reality it was.
And finally, do nothing to compromise your highly targeted list. Avoid the temptation to use strategies that build your list much bigger in an untargeted way.
For instance, make sure that you avoid buying subscribers – this will only ever mean that you get a completely un-targeted list that never agreed to be messaged by you. This is exactly the same with buying email lists … just don’t do it.
Likewise, avoid offering freebies and goodies to try and get people to subscribe or follow. While this may sound counter -intuitive this will attract people who just like to get free stuff which isn’t really the targeted audience you are likely to want as a business!
Never strong arm, trick or push people into subscribing or following you. Only have people that genuinely want to be on your list and that can’t wait to hear what you have to say next!