Social media marketing and SEO have taken the entrepreneur world by a storm. With new platforms seemingly being released every day, it’s important to keep up to date with the latest trends and key demographics for your business. Understanding your target audience, what social media sites they may use, and what they respond to will make your marketing efforts that much easier.
Understand Your Target Audience
“Knowing who your customer is, knowing that demographic is very important because you can tie that into the platform. Where is most of my demographic?” -Mfon Akpan
First and foremost, understand the platform that your market is on. If your demographic is 35 to 45-year-old males, you may want to take a second look at marketing on Facebook and their ad platform. Additionally, when creating your ads, don’t make them according to how the average 20 year old would respond to them, create all your content directed towards the demographic you want to appeal to.
Your audience will typically fluctuate on the social media platform they use depending on the timeline. Using our previous example, in 10 years the original 35 to 40 year old demographic that you wanted to appeal to are now 45 to 55 years old. A decision now must be made, do you continue marketing to your loyal customers or do you stay on the path you’re on and try to attract new consumers within your original parameters?
By directly engaging with your target market with giveaways or some type of giving back can give you a better understanding of which consumers are staying loyal to your brand or if it’s time to switch it up. Advertising is focused on the target audience you want to buy into your brand or services. Crafty stay-at-home moms or dads are more likely to use Pinterest than LinkedIn and the 45-year-old businesswoman who wants to build her connections will most often than not use LinkedIn or Facebook.
Social Media Analytics: How to Use to Your Advantage
Social media analytics is another great way to see how your marketing efforts are coming along. Facebook, Instagram, Google, all of these platforms, and more have similar dashboards, making it easy to do a cross-examination of which social media site is outperforming the others. Social media can be broken down into three main categories:
Paid: Things you’re paying for
Owned: Your business accounts
Earned: Chatter outside of your space and what others are sharing
Knowing and understanding these three categories of social media will help you better interpret your analytical results and which social media marketing concept engages visitors. What are you paying for and how is it working? What number of people are you reaching? Does your business account perform well organically? These are questions to ask yourself that can help you determine where you should focus your marketing efforts.
“In order to really assess it you have to understand the analytics.” -Mfon Akpan
Social media and social media marketing are concepts that have grown proportionally strong since the start of smartphones, laptops, and personal computers. Every business owner should begin to learn what social media marketing means for their small business. Social media marketing benefits can give you a big influx of new customers, grow your business, and allow you to expand to new markets and areas.
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