Tag Archive for: audience

Moving from Target Audience to Customer

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Every business needs to understand its target customer. The best businesses invest time and energy into developing a deep, granular understanding of that target.

They move beyond “middle aged women” to “married women in their 50’s with no children living at home who live along the East Coast and have a strong interest in gardening, health, and leisure travel.” Etc. They get as detailed as possible.

Define the Groups Within Your Target Audience

With an understanding of the target customer in hand, it is time to start thinking about the many stages that these people can be at in their relationship with you:

  • Unaware
  • Newly aware
  • New customer
  • Seasonal customer
  • Active/engaged customer
  • Best customer
  • Inactive customer

There may be more or fewer categories that are relevant to the relationship you want to build with your target audience. The important thing is to define the various relationship stages that can exist. Then, you can develop targeted communication to engage with people at each stage.

Target Communication Based on the Current Relationship

For each stage, you will want to consider:

  • Are there any characteristics common to people at this stage?
  • What does this person want to know?
  • What motivates this person to move to a more active relationship with me?
  • What information or resources will help this person move to the next stage of a relationship with me?
  • Where does this person get information about me? (Website, social media, email, events, print material, networking, etc.)

After all this research, you are now well positioned to develop messaging for your target audience at every stage. You will know what key points to target, and where and how to share the information.

5 Easy Ways to Gain Social Media Followers

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Brands use social media platforms to connect with their audience. So, you want to gain social media followers for your brand.

You want to connect with people who will actively engage with your content, share it with their networks, and be customers. Here are 5 tactics to consider to grow your social media following.

Post Content Your Audience Cares About

Give both prospective and current fans a reason to follow you on multiple platforms. Don’t just share links, share your perspective. Create content that people won’t see elsewhere. Provide value and entice followers to stay tuned in.

Tailor your content for each channel’s users. Use Twitter to share latest news and real-time alerts and Facebook to tell longer stories about the people who are part of your brand. Use Instagram to share awesome images that illustrate who you are.

Respond to Your Community

When a follower takes time to comment or send you a question, respond. Quickly. Let them know they matter.

When you make your online community feel heard and acknowledged, they’re more likely to become engaged and serve as your most loyal social media ambassadors.

Include a Visual with Every Post

Include an eye-catching, colorful image or graphic with each post. The data shows that content with relevant images gets more views than content without images.

Video gets the most engagement on all social platforms, so use video if you can. Be sure to upload your video directly to your platform of choice, rather than posting a link to an outside website (like YouTube). This way, your video will autoplay as people land on it while scrolling through their feeds, grabbing more attention. There is also evidence that most platforms give higher visibility to videos that are not external links.

Change Your Page Photos

Keep your presence fresh and new by updating your profile photo and banner. Use them to showcase your latest developments and demonstrate that you are active.

Be Personable

The most successful brands on social media establish a personality. They create content that makes people smile and even laugh. (We all need to laugh!) Find a way to connect with your followers that injects some fun into the experience.

Know Thy Audience

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Set yourself up for success on social media by learning everything you can about your audience. Take time to research what your audience needs and what they do online.

This research comes from social media listening – or monitoring what’s going on. Here’s how to start listening and building your understanding of your audience and their needs.

Define your audience.

Your audience is not everyone. It’s not all women or all men. You need to get to a much more specific definition of your audience in order to be effective.

Knowing who your audience is and what they expect on social is key to creating content that they will like, comment on, and share. You want to define demographics, motivations, common objections or issues, and the emotional needs of your audience.

Gather real-world data.

Social media analytics can also provide a ton of valuable information about who your followers are, where they live, which languages they speak, and how they interact with your brand on social.

Each platform offers metrics. There are also insightful research studies published by Pew and others. Data insights allow you to refine your strategy and better target your content to your audience.