Social Media Audience Characteristics: How to Reach Your Customers. Struggling to find your ideal customers online? We're here to help! Read our handy guide to reaching men, women, Gen X, Millennials and Gen Z via social. Social media is one of the most potent weapons in a marketer’s arsenal. Engage on social media. With Statista reporting more than three billion active social media users worldwide, it’d be a waste not to utilize social media to reach your target market.
- Social Media Strategy: Reaching Your Audience. November 19, 2020 @ 9:00 am - 10:30 am. Event Navigation.
- Social Media Strategy: Reaching Your Audience. Public Hosted by Clayton County Water Authority Small Local Business Enterprise Program.
In a time where everyone is online, social media marketing is one of the most efficient ways to reach your audience. Knowing your audience is a vital step in running a great marketing campaign. This involves collecting information regarding your best customer’s age, gender, education, their language and location, their relationship status, their motivators, and their likes and dislikes. This data is better known as first-party data. Collecting this data gives you an upper hand in serving your audience better and helps weed out fake profiles.
Putting Your Ad Money to Good Use
First-party data is an asset that can help maximize a company’s marketing efforts. A company can also learn more about its most valuable customers and monetize on it by making the right decisions. Here are some strategies that can help a company strategize its efforts better:
- People spend more time on social media platforms than any other websites. Companies must find out the platforms their target audience prefers and concentrate their efforts on those platforms.
- Companies must speak the language of the target audience by extracting their needs from the first-party data and molding their offerings accordingly.
- Narrowing down one’s target audience truly helps deliver to the most precise group of customers possible. Most social media platforms offer services to reach your best customers.
- Videos help engage audiences much faster than other mediums. Companies should invest money to producing high-quality video contentto captivate their audience.
- Marketers should identify and seek help from top influencers among their target audience, such as actors, comedians, and YouTube and Instagram stars, to build better marketing campaigns.
- Brands need to make sure that their content has the potential to go viral. Shareable content provides higher return on investment and expands a brand’s reach.
Microtargeting: The New Marketing Trend
Microtargeting involves using a customer database to personalize marketing efforts to an individual level. Along with big data and social marketing platforms, microtargeting is accomplished by using AI, analytics, and behavioral modeling or psychographic profiling. This approach works in both B2C and B2B markets. In both cases, the ability to capture niche markets gives a company an upper hand over its competitors as people appreciate content that is relevant. Data-based tactics such as this can ensure better responses from the consumers. Political campaigns use microtargeting to make sure that the right information reaches their voters.
Problems in Social Media Targeting
With most companies adopting targeting strategies, people have been questioning the morality of online targeting. The practice of targeting is most certainly moral unless the company is using the technique to engage in unlawful marketing practices.
Online privacy has been another concern of social media users in the recent times. In order to protect the personal privacy of people, America’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) now requires Internet-service providers to ask customers for permission if they want to gather and share data that is deemed to be sensitive.
The ethics of social media targeting has been a topic of debate for a while now, but companies still believe that it is a reliable tool to reach out to the right audience.
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When you talk about your digital marketing strategy, do you allocate any budget to social media advertising? If not, your brand could be missing out on hundreds or even thousands of potential customers per day. The main power of social media advertising is the ability to select a targeted audience. You can base this on demographics, your own email list, or even users who interacted with your ads but did not convert and show them an ad in real-time as they are looking through their social media feeds.
Why Are Most Businesses Advertising on Social Media?
It’s clear that people are spending more and more time on social media. According to social media advertising statistics published by Hootsuite, 70 percent of people in North America use social media every day. They are also spending more time on social media than they do watching TV. That’s a big shift from even just a decade ago and presents a real opportunity to reach potential customers.
Quicktime player for mac mojave. Many businesses currently use social media advertising to reach more customers, go viral with video campaigns, and re-market to users who showed signs of interest by interacting with a social media page or ad. Statistics published by Sprout Social confirm that 37 percent of consumers use their favorite social network for inspiration on what purchases to make! No wonder social media ad spend in the US is expected to reach $18.4 billion by the end of 2019, according to Spout Social.
With those numbers, it’s clear to see why businesses value the power of reaching a highly engaged audience, any time of day, right in their timeline feeds through social media advertising.
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Strategies
Benefits of Social Media Advertising
Whether you want to generate leads, drive purchases, or build brand awareness, social media advertising can do all three at once. More people will know your brand, like your content, and follow you on social media just by connecting with your ad. If you want to drive website traffic, you don’t even need a big budget to get started.
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Marketing
Here are some benefits of investing in social media advertising:
- Great visibility of your brand and products
- Ability to re-engage past customers, website visitors, or users who have interacted with your Facebook page or ads with re-engagement campaigns
- Intuitive audience targeting by interest, behavior, gender, age, and more, with over 35 million other data points through Facebook alone
- Reach local customers instantly by geo-targeting
- Mobile social media users see your ad right on their phones, and they can click and shop within Facebook and Instagram
- Schedule out promotions in advance with any size budget, and charge per impression or click
Some would argue the most significant benefit of social media advertising is creating more efficiency in ad spend. You can target users who showed interest or interacted with a previous social media ad, making it more likely that they’ll convert. For example, a user visits your webpage by clicking on an ad but does not complete the purchase. You have the ability to aggressively re-engage that user for a certain amount of days. You can make it so the ad shows up in their social media feed for that amount of time or until they convert.
Things to Consider When Advertising on Social Media
To put it simply, you have to know where your audience is. Chances are the majority of your customers are on Facebook’s network. With 3 billion users on Facebook and Instagram, you can instantly reach thousands of users by creating a Facebook Business Account.
Here are four questions to consider before putting together a social ad campaign:
- What are your social advertising goals? Maybe you want more visibility, or you want to sell products directly from the ad. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and other social media networks let users shop directly through the social media platform. By defining your goals first, you can use them as a foundation for all your plans moving forward.
- Who do you want to target? You can create hundreds of custom audiences through Facebook’s Ad Manager. So if you know your demographics, it’s easy to enter zip codes, DMAs, gender, age, marital status, interests, behaviors, and even more granular targeting factors. In addition, you must decide which network offers the most reach. Facebook’s audience is pretty broad, but perhaps you want to cater to beauty and fashion on Pinterest or Instagram. You could also have a B2B campaign on Twitter or LinkedIn.
- How much will you spend? Depending on the advertising platform, you can set budgets by day or for the entire campaign. You can advertise for as little as $5 in some markets, but you can pick and choose days of the week you want to advertise so you can plan your budget accordingly. Social networks typically charge advertisers by impression, click, or conversion.
- What marketing materials and advertising graphics will you use? You’ll need images, videos, and marketing copy to create sponsored social media posts.
Increase Brand Authority and Bring in New Customers
In addition to your traditional social media content, advertising adds more visibility and drives users to make purchases. You don’t even have to use hard sales techniques to reach these audiences either. In fact, social media users engage with advertisers just like they do with other users, and it’s up to brands to respond in order to promote a sale or more engagement.
With social media advertising, small and large businesses access a ton of targeting tools that open up new revenue or lead generation funnels almost instantly. In today’s digital age, it’s even better than word-of-mouth advertising because you can tailor your ads to specific groups and make it stand out in the crowd with focused messaging.
To Sum It Up
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Examples
Investing in social media advertising gives businesses powerful niche targeting tools and the ability to engage active users, generate leads, drive traffic, and build brand awareness, all with a relatively small budget.
Reaching Your Audience With Social Media Skills
If you’d like to learn more about social media advertising, the Levy Online team is here to help. With years of experience and many successful digital marketing campaigns under our belt, we can help you find your audience and achieve your sales goals with strong social media strategies. We also have a professional in-house design team to really make your ads pop. Contact us today!