Successful social media marketing campaigns begin with a solid understanding of your target customers motivations, involvement and perceptions. Below I share three easy to follow steps that identifies your target consumer, what drives them and the content necessary to have a successful interaction.
Step 1: Identify Your Audience
First thing you need is about 3 sites you either consider competitors or big brands for your industry. As an example, if you are doing a campaign for an insurance company you would likely look at Geico, State Farm and Allstate. Head over to Quantcast.com and put in each site one by one.
Make notes on each about Gender, Age, Family, Income and College. It is also a good idea to look at similar interests for opportunities you might not have thought of or known about. An alternative to Quantcast is Google Ad Planner.
Step 2: Understand Your Audience
Now you should have a solid customer persona to determine how your future customers currently use social media already.
The next step is to input your customer persona into the Global Web Index to develop your social media strategy. Based on your previous observations you pick female U.S. residents age 35-44 who are informers because you want them to spread the word to others for a better shot at going viral.
The Global Web Index gives you insights into three areas: motivations for getting online, behaviours once online, and perceptions of the way brands interact with social media.
You discover the top motivators for your insurance demographic:
- Stay in touch with friends
- Research / find products to buy
- Research how to do things
- Stay up to date on news / events
Providing in depth research, news & events appear as the keys to success so far. Now it is time to see how your demographic interacts with social media.
It is clear that your target consumers:
- Watch videos
- Use webmail (e-mail)
- Upload photos
Now you know that your research & news content should be in video format and a great way to get them to spread the word to friends is to prompt them to e-mail the video to friends. You can also make a safe bet they are uploading photos on Facebook to stay in touch with friends. You might consider asking them to upload a picture of what caused them to file their last insurance claim to tap into this behaviour.
Before kicking off your social media campaign check to make sure it is likely to create a positive impression of your brand:
The two most positive perception builders:
- Using targeted advertising
- Becoming your friend in a social network
These both imply that your customers want you to leverage what you know about them and learn more about them.
Step 3: Discover Content Cravings
You have a solid idea of who your audience is, what type of content they want (research & news) and what drives them to spread your brand message. The final step is to find out the questions they want answers to already. Head over to Wordtracker's keyword questions tool and put in the short one and two word phrases that describe your industry or product: insurance, annuity, life insurance, car insurance, disability in this example. [Ed.: or use the real questions your visitors ask]
These questions are exactly what your research videos should answer to satisfy your target customer.
Just follow these steps to create content that your customers will spread like wildfire.
Missed anything? Have a different process? Share in the comments!
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