How to Find Your Online Audience on Social Media – Ep 85
In this episode, we walk through the four ways that you can find your customers and where they hang out online in social media.
In last week’s episode #84, 5 Steps to Define Your Ideal Customer, we worked on defining our perfect customer. The next step is to find your customer or audience online in social media.
Four Ways to Find Your Perfect Customer
- Look at your competitors and other big names
- Make a list of well-known people, businesses, media companies, and others in your field that have a big online presence and that talk about similar or related things. Take note of what their audience is talking about and create content that would attract them.
- Take the definition of your perfect customer from the last episode and make a list of who that person is, which magazines and publications they read, what their lifestyle interests are, what music they listen to, where they go and what communities they may be in. Build connections to these interests with your content.
- Look for other people in your field that have a large online presence. Look at micro-influencers who talk about related topics where your audience may be interested in not just what they are doing, but what you are doing.
- Don’t be intimidated by other people doing what you’re doing or the market is over-saturated. No one is doing it the same way and if you know the marketplace, you know the holes you can fill.
- Join influencer Facebook groups and listen to the questions people are asking. There’s great intel in doing this. Think about if you can answer any of these questions. Engage in the group and be helpful, which will also help you to be seen.
- Do your research
- Take a deep dive into who your audience is by letting the data guide you. There are so many research studies out there that can help you to define your audience, but probably the most helpful is Pew Internet Research. Check out what demographics are on each platform.
- Pew research began tracking social media usage in 2005, and they have a free and really useful study where they take a detailed look at how people from various demographics use social media platforms. Results are broken down by sex, race, age, income, education and living environment at a very high level.
- Look at the trade associations and niche groups that serve your industry. A lot of those organizations conduct their own research, so you may be able to pull marketing information from these sources.
- Talk to your target audience
- Make a list of 10-20 people that you know who are a part of the audience you think you might want to reach. This can be past clients, friends, and acquaintances from other groups. Create a list of questions that you can ask them, then request a call to talk to them. Don’t sell, just talk.
- If you already have a following, start asking questions on social media, use polls and other built-in features in Twitter and Facebook.
- Use the tools available to you
- Facebook – Go to Insight at the top of your Facebook page. Go to Pages to Watch and watch your competitor’s Facebook pages to see what they’re doing, if their engagement is up and how they are performing. Go to any Facebook Page and on the left sidebar menu, click on Info and Ads to access their ads. You don’t see any data on the ads, but it can be helpful to see what they’re advertising.
- Facebook Ads Manager – Sign up for Facebook Ads Manager, which requires you to have a business page. Put together an ad, pick a goal, pick a location, age, gender and interests. As you pull this information together you get a sense of the size of your potential audience, you don’t even have to run the ad to get the information. If you decide to run an ad, you can run up to six versions at a time to see what messages and graphics resonate best with your audience. This is a great way to test your messages.
Tools, apps and links mentioned:
Take Action
Talk to your audience. Get on the phone with at least 3 people and ask them, “When it comes to (your niche), what is your biggest challenge?” Then, listen, take LOTS of notes and come tell us what they said to you in the Facebook Group.
How to reach Kami:
If you’d like to learn more about Kami Huyse, visit her website at www.zoeticamedia.com. You can contact her by email at kami@zoeticamedia.com or tweet to @kamichat.
How to reach Madalyn:
If you’d like to learn more about Madalyn Sklar, visit her website at www.madalynsklar.com. You can contact her by email at madalyn@madalynsklar.com or tweet to @MadalynSklar.
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