The Essential Guide to Engaging With Your Audience

21Nov

You’ve got great ideas for new content and ads, but how do you know who to target? It’s safe to say that your new boat engine isn’t going to be a hit among lower-income twenty-somethings, which is why you’ll need to speak to the right audience.

But first, you’ll have to find them!

Identifying Your Audience
A tried and true method of finding the right audience is to craft a buyer persona. A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of who you’re selling to, and it makes sure your content is appealing to the right person. Here are some questions to help you create yours:

Where do they shop?
What social media platforms do they use?
What do they wear?
Where do they work?
Are they married?
Do they have kids? How many?
What’s their family situation?
Where do they live? (Think city, but also house, apartment, etc.)
What’s their financial situation?
What do they spend money on?
What’s their name? (This can help you remember that your audience has real people!)

Get as specific as you can! Once you’ve identified exactly who’s buying, you can figure out how to engage with them!

It’s important to remember that engagement best practices will vary from platform to platform, so it’s best to optimize your strategy for each social network.

Facebook
Fair warning: Facebook is one of the most difficult sites for engaging your audience. You want to have genuine, organic conversations, but Facebook’s algorithms tend to prioritize paid content. However, there are some workarounds!

Creating a Facebook group for your business is a great way to foster natural engagement. It will provide a space for your audience to interact directly with your brand, and it isn’t subject to the same algorithms that are at play in the news feed.

When people like your posts, invite them to like your page! They’ve shown that they’re interested in what you have to say, so encourage them to take that final step!

To draw in your audience, you’ll need to create Facebook ads. When writing, keep a clear idea of your buyer persona and what they expect from your brand!

Twitter
When looking for new people to engage with, search by hashtags that your buyer persona would use. It’s all about meeting your audience where they are, not trying to change them!

Another great tactic is to look at who’s following your competitors. If they like what a similar business is selling, they’ll probably like you, too!

Once you’ve found your target audience, what do you do? Like their posts, reply to them, just show them that you’re sincerely interested in what they have to say! Retweeting and quote tweeting are also some great platform-specific tools you should use!

Instagram
The strategies for finding people on Instagram are almost identical to Twitter’s plan: search hashtags and find who’s following your competitors. However, Instagram has one key advantage: location. If you have a brick and mortar store, go after people in your area!

You’ll want to like and comment on posts as always, but don’t stop there. Ask for permission to share a potential customer’s post! Decide whether it would fit best as a post or a story, then show that user you value them by sharing their visual!

LinkedIn
Join groups to find people! These are especially great because you’ll have a common interest to start a conversation. Additionally, you can search for people based on their job title and location. If someone has a job title that usually sends you referrals, then you should connect with them ASAP!

For B2B brands, consider what businesses you want to work with and search for their employees. If you were able to connect with someone, why not go ahead and send invitations to the people they work with?

Of course, there are two very different paths on LinkedIn. A company account can be a great boost for SEO, but it’s irrelevant when you’re trying to engage your audience. If you’re looking to form connections, decide who in your company will be the human face that’s attracting attention on LinkedIn.

Some Guiding Rules
There are certain principles that will serve you well on any platform. These include:

Don’t make a sale on someone else’s post.
Make comments meaningful! Don’t just reply with a thumbs up.
Respond to positive and negative interactions, whether that be via comments or messages!

And there you have it! You have everything you need to find and engage with your audience in a way that’s effective and works toward your marketing goals!

Could your visual content use some help? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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Target Acquired: Tips for Finding Your Audience

By Christopher Tompkins

5Sep

Advertising, Business, Facebook Advertising, Social Media

On your mark . . . . Get set . . . . WAIT!

I have seen so many marketing campaigns that feel like a pee-wee track meet: they are hastily organized, poorly attended, and all hell breaks loose at the sound of the starting pistol.

Too much money, time, and effort are wasted marketing the wrong message to the wrong audience. In fact, you’ve probably done it yourself.

“That’s impossible!” You say. “We hired the best copywriters to create persuasive content! Our design team made stunning visuals! And the videos were so expensive, they had to be good! But we didn’t see any return on our investment!”

You are frustrated and exhausted. “This was the absolutely perfect campaign!” You ask, “where did we go wrong?”

Well, I hate to tell you, but at the very beginning, my friend. When you planned that campaign, did you think about your target consumers or clients?

I am all about planning every single detail prior to the launch of every marketing initiative, but some aspects still get lost in the process. There is one point I don’t feel is emphasized enough when creating the strategy for a marketing initiative: identifying the actual target for all of these marketing efforts.

Everyone is sharing the latest ways to “work” (note the scare quotes) the Facebook algorithm to your advantage or quickly boost your Instagram views, usually with just a few steps (kind of like those “one weird trick to losing weight” ads). Awesome, right? Wrong. All of the tips, tricks, and tactics in the world are useless unless you fully understand who your target audience or customers are.

Right now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “Well, that might be true for some business people, but I know who my customer is.”

Again, I hate to tell you this, but . . . you probably don’t.

I’m not trying to insult your knowledge of your own business, but when you are marketing on social media you need much more than the standard demographic outline. With any digital or online marketing, you need to dive deeper and understand more elements of your target audience.

Not to worry though, I have you covered. Here are some of the simple steps that we take our clients through when they are having trouble identifying their target audience. Let’s go!

1. Money, Money, Money, Money: Yep, everyone loves that green stuff. Turn your attention to your books. It is crucial for you to be able to identify a few key monetary aspects. Who–demographic-wise–is spending the most money? What product or service sells the most? What product/service delivers the highest margin? Once you know that, determine who is buying it. If you are a beauty brand that sells 1,000 hairbrushes for profit of $10 and sells 500 hair dryers for a profit of $400, then I would look into the demographic makeup of that hair dryer crowd–the brand should focus on the products that bring in more money with fewer sales. Use your sales successes and current client roster as your starting point.

2. Sex Matters: If you have a product or service that is specifically made for a woman, it does not mean that men could not be loyal consumers of your company. Don’t ignore any markets or demographics without the proper data to back up your decision! Major opportunities are lost this way.

3. Location x3: Where are your consumers? National, regional, state-wide, city-wide, or even more local? Why do I ask? Well, did you know that you can place advertising to specific audiences based on specific zip codes? Yes – you can be that specific.

So now you will have a very strong initial idea of some of the basic concrete aspects of your target audience. But you want to take this further. You’ll need to create two more items:

1. Baseline Audience Demographic Profile: This is where you take the information gathered from the initial three steps listed above and put it into an outline that can be used as a jumping-off point for further analysis and inspection. The profile would need the following information: age range, gender, location, average value of each new client/customer, net worth, household income, and any other pertinent data.

2. Buyer Profiles: Now this is where you can dive deeper and get more acquainted with your target audience. Buyer profiles allow you to create specific customer profiles that will reflect your audience in multiple ways. These take your existing data and delve deeper into various aspect such as interests, hobbies, media habits, and more. Buyer profiles will help you not only engage with your audience in a more human way, but also identify your audience faster.

While this might seem like a lot of work, the reward is well worth the effort. For one thing, digital marketing gives you more opportunities to target! For instance, did you know that on Facebook alone you can target based on restaurants that your audience visit, movies that they see, and political parties that they follow? And that is just scratching the surface.

So as you can see, it is more than having a product and/or service and simply choosing your audience. Proper audience identification is a process that may take a little time, but pays dividends when completed properly. Take your time and ensure that you have this piece completed before moving forward with any costly or time-consuming marketing activities or initiatives. Otherwise, you’ll be left in the dust.

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The One Mindset That Will Ruin Your Target Advertising

By Christopher Tompkins

28Feb

Facebook, Facebook Advertising, Marketing, Social Media

In our last blog, we spoke about the importance of focusing your audience when you are working on Facebook advertising. This is an extremely important step in reaching the right audience. But time and time again, we hear from professionals who say, “My product is for everybody.”

Having this mindset is when problems start to arise.

There is a distinct possibility that you sell a product or service that could technically be used by everybody. However, that does not mean that every person wants/needs your product.

Everyone drinks water, for instance, so you could easily assume that the target audience of a bottled water campaign would be everybody. However, this disregards the fact that “everybody” would include multiple types of people (demographics), each of which would be best communicated with in a different way. Creating a marketing campaign that speaks to everyone is nearly impossible as different groups receive messages in different ways.

Think of everyone who lives on your street. They all have different ages, different interests, different ways of talking and thinking. So trying to create one style of marketing that would connect with each of them would be impossible.

It’s not just a good lesson for marketing, but a good lesson for life. You can’t be all things to all people.

Even if your product can be used by everybody, it’s best to target your marketing at a specific demographic instead, to make your message more effective. It’s better to hit a million people with a campaign that resonates with them, rather than hitting a billion people with something that makes them all feel apathetic.

In a perfect world, it wouldn’t be the job of your marketing department to choose this target audience anyway, it would happen while developing the product and branding it. Creating a bottled water that appeals to a certain demographic is better than a bottled water that’s supposed to appeal to everybody, and then has marketing targeted at a certain group.

A product or service can die quickly if there is no target demographic even as the product is being thought up. The more thought that is put into your product at the early stages, the better.

This is why it is essential for you to use social media’s plethora of tools to hone in on your ideal customer.

At The Go! Agency, our team of marketers are working hard to ensure our message reaches the right people! All this is so our clients gain optimal online visibility!

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Change Is Good: Why You Need To Tweak Target Audiences On Facebook

By Christopher Tompkins

26Feb

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

Picture this — you own a bakery in Raleigh, NC. You decide to promote your budding brand online through social media marketing with an emphasis on Facebook advertising. But here’s the issue, once you log into your Business Manager, you see a plethora of options ranging from target demographics to specific zip codes to much, much more.

How do you know you are targeting the right people? For some, this leads to a mistake that can waste an entire advertising budget. If you’ve chosen wrongly, your advertisements may be reaching the people that would never bother to enter your bakery and become a loyal customer.

When is it time to consider a change in advertising audience? Here are three scenarios we have seen occur from time to time:

– You received a large number of engagements and conversions with your advertising at first, but showed a significant decrease in the next batch.

– Customers are complaining they are seeing your ads too much.

– You’re getting inquiries for areas your business does not serve.

All of these have happened to real businesses thanks to poor advertising targeting. Unfortunately, you can’t get those hundreds or even thousands of dollars back just because you chose to target the wrong audience members. However, you can move forward and adjust your scope.

Do yourself a favor and step away from your business for a moment and look at your customer base with fresh eyes. You may be interacting with these people on a weekly or even daily basis, but you might not have really looked at who they are. Don’t forget, these are real people with real wants, needs, and lives.

Your goal is to boil down your ideal customer by looking at the categories your customers fit into.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

– What age range does my brand appeal to? Does your business cater to a younger demographic? Or perhaps an older group of people? Maybe you sell products aimed at children, but you should really be marketing to their parents. Or maybe you manage a senior living community, whose audience is not the potential residents, but rather their families, who are in the 35-55 age range.

– What location does my ideal customer live in? Are you trying to appeal to someone in a specific city, like you would if you ran a bakery in Raleigh? Or do you need to compile a list of zip codes to tackle a whole region, like say the Philadelphia / New Jersey region. Regardless, location is an important factor. You may need to adjust your settings so that you don’t over-saturate your market as well, which would actually do damage to your brand.

– What is the income of your ideal customer? We once had a client that owned a luxury home renovation business. They would do amazing work on homes that were worth at least $650K+. Yet before they came to us, they tried to advertise on their own and failed to specify income. Needless to say, they had a lot of calls, but they were dead leads as none of the people that received the ad could afford their services. We were able to narrow their reach and bring them real results.

These are just a few reasons why you need to make sure your social media advertising is on-point. You need to be sure those that see your ads would actually utilize your business.

Here at The Go! Agency, we fine tune our advertising strategy on a daily basis to ensure our clients hit their target!

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Tag : target market

The Essential Guide to Engaging With Your Audience

Target Acquired: Tips for Finding Your Audience

The One Mindset That Will Ruin Your Target Advertising

Change Is Good: Why You Need To Tweak Target Audiences On Facebook