By Well, you’ve come to the right place! Welcome to the Summer of Social, a Vendasta blog series aimed to provide you with all the tips and tricks to create the most engaging, relevant, and interesting social strategies for your clients.
Throughout the next few weeks, I will be discussing a variety of important topics that will directly impact the way you strategize your clients’ online presence. Today we will be discussing why your client’s need to be on social media and how to properly identify their social audience.
Before we dive into the deep end, I want to discuss Vendasta’s Social Marketing. The one place for all of your client’s social media. Social Marketing is a white-label social media tool designed specifically for agency-to-client collaboration. Allowing your team to manage local business’ social accounts in a scalable way. This product will help you to build fans, find customers, and engage with the community on behalf of your clients. Social Marketing is backed by the incredibly powerful Vendasta platform.
Ready to take the plunge? Let's get started!
Why Social Media
As individuals, it’s easy to understand why we’re so obsessed with social media. It helps us to stay in touch with friends, keep up with current events and news, it fills our spare time, allows us to network, be entertained, and it gives us the ability to share parts of our lives. Social media use comes down to a simple basic desire: the need to connect with others. Luckily, technology and the internet have made it so we can connect with anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Download The Ultimate Guide to Effective Social Media for Businesses
Why Social Media for Businesses
But what about businesses? Now that we have a better understanding as to why we as individuals are on social media, it’s time to shift our focus to your clients. If your clients aren’t taking advantage of social, they’re missing out on a fast and effective way to reach a huge audience. Not to mention, if you as an agency aren’t providing these services, you’re missing out on an low-cost way of making revenue. Here are the many ways in which social media can help your clients connect, engage, and grow:
Increase Brand Awareness
Did you know that there are 3.2 billion people using social media? That’s about 42% of the earth’s population. Contrary to popular belief, it’s not just young people using it either. 48% of baby boomers, 77% of Gen X, and 90% of Millennials are using social networks to stay connected. What exactly does this mean? It means that there are a lot more people your clients’ businesses can reach in comparison to traditional methods. Think that users only connect with brands they know and love? Over 50% of people say they use social media to research and discover new products! With the average person spending over two hours per day on social networks, there are a lot of opportunities for your clients to be found.
Humanize the Brand
In order to connect with potential customers, your clients need to show the human side of their brand. Social networking allows businesses to create real human connections. The marketing landscape today, is unique. Brands can showcase their personality and develop personal connections.
Become a Thought Leader
Social media offers the opportunity to establish brands as thought leaders. Posting content that showcases your clients' expertise helps to develop trust amongst their followers.
Stay Top of Mind
Social media is powerful in keeping businesses top of mind with consumers. Every time a user logs in or opens an app it is an opportunity for your clients to connect. When making a purchase, recent social media posts can help consumers with their decision.
Increase Website Traffic
The power of social media doesn’t stop on the networks. Sharing great content from your clients’ blog to social channels can increase readership. Additionally, posts and updates can lead users to the website through a link.
Customer Service and Support
Finally, social media can be an excellent customer service and support tool. It allows users to ask questions in real-time through a variety of channels that were previously not available. Businesses can respond instantly and deal with any comments, queries, or concerns. These responses can be more personal and unique to the individual or situation. It’s important to note that social media doesn’t work in the same way that traditional marketing efforts do.
So, why is it important to define your clients’ target social audience? First, It ensures you’re creating the right content for the right people. Second, it helps you to better understand how to create content that actually connects and benefits readers. Finally, and probably the most exciting reason, it helps to increase conversions.
Defining a Target Social Audience
Now that we understand the importance of defining your clients’ target social audience it’s time to get to work. Follow these steps when defining your clients' audience:
Look at the current customer base
When beginning to develop your client’s social audience it’s important to take a close look at the current customer base. Who is already purchasing and celebrating your clients' brand? Look for common characteristics and interests. It is very likely that other people like them could benefit from the product or service.
Analyze the product or service
The next step is to take a look at your clients' current offering. What products or services are they currently selling? What features provide the biggest benefit to consumers? Understanding how people are using the current offering helps to identify the key selling factors and valued aspects of the business.
Check out the competition
If you want to get a good idea of how your clients' business and industry are interpreted online, it’s in your best interest to see what others are doing. Who is the competition targeting with their social media strategies? You may just find a niche market that they are overlooking.
Choose specific demographics
It’s important when defining the target social audience to use specific demographics. Consider the age, gender, occupation, and location of consumers who would purchase your clients' product or service. Whatever demographics you choose will be the basis of how you form your social media strategy; try to be realistic.
It’s important to note that there are many assumptions we can make that have the potential to damage the effectiveness of the target social audience. Avoid thinking that the social audience is just like you. The audience may have similarities, but they’re not necessarily the same person. Make sure you are developing the right audience for your clients’ businesses by taking your time while going through the above steps.