When you’re talking to someone face to face, you’ll probably adjust your strategy depending on who they are. You wouldn’t talk to an experienced veteran of your profession in quite the same way as you’d talk to a young professional just starting out, for example.
The same is true for social media. You absolutely have to know who your audience is to market to them effectively. If you’re selling to the construction supply chain, or directly to plumbers, builders, and electricians, you need to speak their language. It’s incredibly important for many reasons: 83% of marketers say that their main area of focus is the use of strategic keywords in their content, but how do you know what keywords your audience uses?
Similarly, 36.7% of marketers report that creating engaging visual content consistently is one of their top struggles. This is especially important as the right visual content will build your audience (tweets with videos get 10x more engagement than those without), but without the right profiles you’re shooting in the dark. Even if you have been marketing your products for years and think you know your audience, it’s worth revisiting your audience profiles and committing budget to research it.
Here are 5 tips on how to know more about your audience:
1) Review your data
First, collect all your current data on your customers for review. This way you’ll already have a basic understanding of what you know. From here, you can extrapolate what you need to find out. How old is the data? How complete is it? The first step is knowing what you don’t know.
2) Look at your successes
You’ve been at this a while, so you’ve likely had some successes. Analyse them. Why did they work? Your message clearly resonated with your core audience. Use this to workshop your next social media strategies.
3) Create buyer personas
Do you have buyer personas? If not, now is the perfect time to create them. These personas will help you target the right audience on social media by answering key questions such as why they need your product, what problems they’re facing, and how you can convert them.
4) Look to your competitors
Always look to see what your competitors are doing. Are they successful, or are they failing? Either way, this will tell you a lot about the market and what your audience does and does not want from your social media.
5) Monitor your engagement
Keep a sharp eye on your social media posts. Are they getting good levels of engagement? This constant monitoring will tell you a lot about your audience’s likes and habits, data that you can use to your advantage.
If you need help finding your audience then talk to Build PR. We’re a small, friendly consultancy that cares about our clients and works tirelessly to give you the maximum return on your investment. We’ve represented some of the biggest names in the construction industry and pride ourselves on delivering an excellent service, drawing on clearly defined values. Why not see what we’ve done for some of our clients here.
Build PR can help you define and reach your audience - get in touch so we can give you big agency impact without the big agency fees.