To be successful at social media you need the right mindset…
83% of consumers seek the advice of their friends to help them make consumption decisions including what to purchase or not – Nielson’s “Trust in Advertising Report” 2015
Are you turned off by pushy salespeople shouting their offers at you? It works the same way in social media. American’s hate to be sold to but they are also part one of the largest consumer nations in the world. You need to keep your audience in mind and “Answer their Question.” What are they looking for? What value can you add to their lives? How can you help with their problem? What can you do to be useful?
Do not engage is social media if you’re only going to promote your own products or services – you will fail. You need to contribute and become a member of your audiences the community.
The paradigm: It’s NOT Selling – It’s Buying.
You need to be useful, informative, honest, and helpful and offer information that will help your customer base.
Identifying Your Niche and your Customer
According to eMarketer report – 80% of marketers begin with tactics.
As you begin reading marketing books and social media blogs, you will see a lot of the conversations will be about tactics. Fast paths to success and promises of easy returns – it’s easy to get caught up in this thinking.
You’re looking at it from the wrong perspective.
Don’t worry about all of the platforms and their rules… Worry about your goals first.
Look at the big picture first, then zoom in and reverse engineer individual strategies.
What’s Your Target Niche?
Your target niche could be anything you want… There are over 500M blogs in the world!
The more success you have in that niche, the more success you will have.
As a person, you want everyone to like you, but online you don’t need to worry about everyone . You only need to worry about the ones that pay you.
The more specific and tightly focused your niche is, the easier it will be to start a conversation with your audience and the more successful you will be.
Example: Think about the travel niche…
How would you target everyone? That’s a big market.
How about backpacking travelers? That’s a little more specific.
How about single college students backpacking through Sweden? Do you see the difference?
Look at how tightly focused this group is. Think how easy it is to find out their questions and problems, and how much simpler it will be to provide answers and start a conversation.
Think of competition for a moment… Do you think there is a lot of competition in the travel industry? A quick Google search found 8 billion results for travel compared to 725 results for single college student backpacking Sweden. That’s a big difference in competition.
No matter what your industry is, there are subgroups within it. Look for them and decide where enter the market.
Owning it
When thinking about defining your market, think about what you want your company’s brand to be and how other people will perceive it.
Example:BMW is the “Ultimate Driving Machine”
When BMW makes a car, each one has to be the “Ultimate Driving Machine.” When it comes to customer support, would the “Ultimate Driving Machine” have bad customer support? No. You should expect there to be minimal problems with the vehicle. If a problem should arise, BMW will handle it quickly and efficiently. When making the car, the “Ultimate Driving Machine” will have attributes that set it apart from other cars.
Do you see how the brand the “Ultimate Driving Machine” flows throughout the entire process? Each decision made should complement the ultimate driving machine brand. This doesn’t mean BMW does not have customers that are only interested in the design or have purchased the car as a status symbol.
Ask yourself two questions…
- Do you know what you’re selling?
- Who is your target audience?
To truly understand your customer, you’ll need to ask some questions… Here are a few things that you should ask:
- Who is using your product or service?
- How did they find your website?
- Are they male or female?
- How old are they?
- What company (if any) are they with?
- Are they happy with your product or service?
- If your company was unavailable, what company would they have used?
- What can you do to improve your offering?
- Who would benefit the most from using your product or service
By getting the responses to questions like these, you will be able to understand the true motives behind your customers.
Example: Hard Drives Online
There was a company that sold hard drives online and for years they thought the main reason people were buying their hard drives were to upgrade computers. It wasn’t until they created a survey that they learned the majority of their customers were surveillance companies using the hard drives to store security footage.
Once the company realized this, they changed their messages towards security and surveillance companies. By doing this, they were able to become the leader in security storage solutions. Due to the competitiveness of computer hard drives, this company would never have dominated the retail computer hard drive market
Not sure how your message or business is perceived now? Ask your audience. Start with the clients who were upset with your service. Ask people who didn’t purchase. Use anonymous surveys or other tools to find out if you’re offending anyone without knowing it.
Resources:
Who’s your ideal client?
If you have clients you don’t like – don’t make them your niche – why suffer?
Your ideal client…
Which client do you love working with? Why?
Who is your ideal client?
- If your current client pays you 10K – the ideal client pays you 20K
- What’s their name, age, gender, education?
- What their hair color, eye color, weight?
- Are they single or married,? Do they have a family?
- Where do they live? What’s their house like?
- What do they do – career, entertainment, vacations?
- What are their needs, wants, objections?
- What keeps them awake at night worrying?
- How much money can they spend on you?
- Why would they invest in you – the good, bad, ugly
- Think about about objections… Why would they invest in you – good stuff vs bad stuff
- Consider your proving versus your competition
Download the cheat sheets and a journey mapping toolkit for free on https://learn.smaply.com.
By going through the steps and creating a detailed customer persona, you’ll be able to develop a marketing campaign that will appeal to certain personalities – your audience.
To be truly excellent at online marketing, you need to understand your audience and know what their motivating factors are. To get you started, I suggest you read through a couple of articles and a mini-course created by Neil Patel and the smart folks at QuickSprout & KISSmetrics:
- The Complete Guide to Understanding Consumer Psychology
- How to Integrate Psychology Into Your Marketing
- How Colors Affect Conversion Rate
Understanding your customers’ motives
People usually purchase products or services:
A) To solve problems.
B) To make themselves feel better.
C) To satisfy basic needs.
Understanding why your customers are purchasing from you, along with other information, will help target your market efforts.
Target Marketing or Market Segmentation
One of the biggest mistakes a business owner can make is to believe that anyone and everyone will want to purchase their new product or service. Other business owners will make the mistake of guessing their target market. Both sets of answers are broad markets. Target marketing breaks the market into segments, allowing the company to focus on a few key segments instead of a broad market. Using target marketing effectively will make your marketing efforts more cost-efficient. Social media makes target marketing easier because potential clients are following you – they already have an interest in your products or services.
There are many ways to use target marketing. The most common ways are to break down potential customers:
- By location – grouping people by location.
- By lifestyle – for example pet owners, people who like to cook, travel, etc.
- By demographics – age, income, education, etc.
Be careful when attempting to market by age… The days of marketing to 18 to 45 year-old groups are long gone. Today, there are 40+ year-olds playing games with kids, getting their first tattoos and dying their hair green. You could have two 62 year-old men: One retired, his kids grown and he is divorced. The other has a young wife, a newborn and enjoys working every day.
There are more efficient factors in determining which market to target:
- Required market share needed to break even.
- Loyalty of existing customers in the segment.
- Growth rate.
- Expected profit margins.
- Competition in the segment.
Larger segments usually have more competition so it might be more advantageous to target a smaller markets with a Higher growth rate than a larger market.
Another strategy is to look at who your direct competition is targeting. Do not go after their customers, look for a market they are overlooking and target that market before they do.
Once you’ve picked your target markets, make sure the people in these markets will really benefit from your product or service. Ensure there are enough people in the market to break even. Can your target markets afford your product or service? Do not make the price too inexpensive or make the mistake of not thinking of the long-term effects of pricing.
Defining your target market is not easy. Unless you are lucky, it will take a few attempts but will be easier than trying to market blindly to everyone.
How do you identify your niche?
Look in the mirror…
Do you already have clients? What are they like? Look at all of your clients and draw correlations.
What about social accounts? Check and see who is following you.
What about a website? Check your analytics and get as much information about your website traffic as you can…
What website did they come from?
What webpages are visitors going to?
How long are they on your website?
What keywords did they use to find you?
How did they navigate through your website?
Where did they go when they left your website?
Where are they physically located?
What kind of computer are they using?
How big is their monitor?
Find all of the information you can about your website and social traffic. If you do a thorough job here – the rest will be easy.
Once you know your audience – you’ll know which platform they are hanging out on.
The more you know about your audience, the better you’ll be able to deliver the kind of helpful content and updates they’re interested in. This article, 18 Incredibly useful tools for getting to know your audience better, by Kevan Lee (TheNextWeb.com) offers you simple research tools to help you learn your audience better.