One of the most important steps in a successful social media strategy is choosing the right social media channels. I get asked it all the time - what social network should my business invest in? The short answer is surprisingly simple. If a large percentage of your target audience use a channel and you have the resources to serve it well, then you should be there. It does go a little bit deeper than this, but it is not rocket science.
Today I am going to outline an easy step by step process to ensure you pick the right social media marketing platforms to connect with your target audience.
1.Clearly define your target market
Trying to determine what social media networks to use without understanding your target market is like shooting in the dark - chances are you will miss the mark. For most of you reading this, I'm sure you have a general idea on your target market (age, gender, location, income). However, a broad idea of your audience will not enable you to cut through the clutter of today's noisy social media landscape. To be successful you need to identify smaller niches within your target audience.
For example, let's say you sell online gym nutrition plans and your target audience is females aged between 18- 35 who earn between $45 to $80k P/A. That is a good start but this group have a range of interests, ideals and needs. If you think about it, an 18 year old athlete looking to play professional basketball and a 31 year old professional accountant looking to get fit for summer could both be in the market for your product. However, they both have very different requirements and they more than likely frequent different social channels. If you were to go by demographics alone the 18 year old would likely be on Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr and the 30 year old on Pinterest and Linkedin.This is why it's crucial to identify smaller niches within your overall target market before we go any further. To help you narrow down your audience some criteria you could use include:
- Specific interest
- Socio-economic status
- Employment
- Marital Status
- Life stage
Once you understand the demographics (the who) of your target audience it is also important to understand the psychographics (the why). A psychographic study will identify the drivers behind your target demographics purchase decisions. This is important to understand as each social network has its own nuisances that may or may not match the psychographics of your target audiences.
2. Determine what social media channels your target audience frequent
Alright, so you are clear on who your target audiences are. Now it is time to determine where they are spending time online. It is important to understand marketing is no longer about harassing consumers for their attention, it is now about meeting consumers where there attention already lies. To determine what social networks your customers are on I would recommend following these steps:
Social Listening:
Set up a social listening station and create a list of keywords that identify conversations about your brand, competition and industry. There are some great social media tools such as Social Mentions that will scour almost any social network to search for keyword mentions. From there you create a list of all the predominant networks your, brand (if you're established), industry and competition is mentioned on.
Market Research:
The next step is to research and understand the current size, demographics and nuisances of each of the major and emerging social networks in your target location. A good resource for the latest social media trends and statistics is BusinessInsider.com. Once you understand the who, what, where and why of each social media channel you can simply match them up with the who, what, where and why of your target audience. You will find some fit your target audience perfectly and others not so well. Let me give you an example- let' say you are a high end car dealership and your target market is professional males, between the ages of 40-45, with a disposable income of 100k plus. Statistics tell us that Linkedin's audience skews professionals males, with a disposable income of 100K+ therefore LinkedIn will be a good pick.
Market Forecasting:
Now we plan ahead and add emerging social media networks that your target audience will likely use in the future to your list. It is important to be where your customers are now but it's even more important to beat your competition to where your customers will be in five years' time. As a general rule early adopters will give you a good idea of the demographic that will become primary users of any given network. It is also important to monitor the evolution of popular social networks you may not have included in your initial list as they may become relevant in the future.
3.Establish social media marketing objectives and company resources
If you take one thing out of this article let it be this, you are better off being amazing across a few social media channels than mediocre on many. By now you would have a pretty robust list of platforms, so what ones are going to give you the most bang for buck? To determine this I would analyse your marketing objectives, resources and competition.
Marketing Objectives
It is important to pick channels that align with your marketing goals. To give a few examples..If your objective is to boost your SEO, then Google+ would be a priority. If you are shooting for pure brand awareness with millennials (Gen Y) then Vine and Snapchat will be a good investment. If your goal is to generate referral traffic back to your website then you should focus on Twitter and Pinterest as these networks historically generate the most referral traffic.
Resources
It is important to take into consideration the human resources (internal or external) your company has at hand to complete the core social media tasks:
- Posting updates to social profiles
- Discovering and curating outside content
- Engaging with your community
- Monitoring conversations
- Reviewing analytic's
If you have one social media manager then chances are you will only be able to excel on one social media platform. However, if you have a team of twenty dedicated social media managers with the right skill sets then you will likely be able to serve a multitude networks well. It is also important to bet on your strengths - if you can produce great visual content then Instagram and Pinterest might be worth your time, on the other hand if you are creating a lot blog posts Twitter and Facebook might be a better use of your time.
Competition
You have two options here, if your competition is dominating a particular network you can either choose to go head to head with them or you can look for an untapped opportunity in another social media channel. Let's put this in perspective if 18 year olds are a profitable Niche for gym nutrition plans and you can't steal enough mindshare off your competition on Instagram, then it might be worthwhile looking at Snapchat for a brand awareness campaign.
Do you use the same process to indentify what social networks to target? I would love to hear what process you use. Please leave a comment.