Recent Discussions on Targeting within Social Media

I’ve recently run into a few prospects and clients who are still wondering what approach to take with social media. It runs the gamut from a cookie cutter approach to just focusing on one primary audience amongst many, and beyond. The permutations are endless.

What I always come back to is, “who is your audience?”.

Hopefully, you have a well crafted brand strategy that accounts for the various audience personas, including demographics and psychographics, that describe what it is they are looking for, what their pain points are and where you will find them. If you have, half of your work is done for you in knowing WHAT you need to say, HOW you need to say it and WHERE you need to show it.

If you only have one target audience because of the category in which you do business, then you only have to focus on one audience. However, if you’ve identified multiple audience types that each bring value to your bottom line, it is a fool’s errand to focus on one and discount the others. Too many times people will assume if they’ve built a strategy for one audience it will work for the other, and it just isn’t the case. You identified different targets for a reason, leverage them to your full advantage! Otherwise, what was the point? For many, “out of sight, out of mind” is a true concept, and if you discount your other audience types for another, not only will you not be on their radar for communications, but they could become actively offended and remove themselves from your revenue stream because of it. Losing audience members usually equates to lost dollars.

So, when it comes to building a social media strategy, always revisit your foundation. Your brand strategy will give you the platform from which to craft the approach, your business plan (goals) will give you the parameters and structure from which to build and the marketing plan (message) will give you the color with which to say it.

As always, if you need help or a sounding board, I’m here.

___________________________________________________