Informative

How Understanding Your Social Audience Shapes Your Entire Marketing Strategy

Social media should be part of every smart marketer’s strategy in 2020. A growing user base, a wealth of information, user-specific targeted ads, and a variety of platforms offer marketers immense benefits. But these benefits aren’t restricted to your social marketing strategy. If you understand your social audience, these insights can also be applied to your other marketing channels too. Read on to discover how understanding your social audience shapes your entire marketing strategy, and how you can better understand your audience in 2020.

Rodney Laws

Guest Writer

May 4, 2020

Why does your social audience matter?

Understanding your social audience is one of the best things you can do for your marketing strategy, regardless of which channels you use. It is comparable to market research, an essential element of starting a business. Just as market research reveals where your business needs to be directed, when you know your audience, you know what matters to them and what appeals to them.

In essence, you know how to finesse and pivot your marketing in order to get the best results, by appealing to your audience as living, breathing human beings.

So why your social audience? Why not your email recipients or website traffic? While the latter groups shouldn’t be excluded from your marketing research, your social audience offers far greater depth and insight than your other channels.

Social platforms are, as the name suggests, social. They possess and convey vast depths of information about your audience, not just as a general customer base, but as individuals.

It is this granular insight that offers the most potential for your marketing. From interests and hobbies to communication style, social media readily captures all this information, and it’s a gold mine for marketers.

Three ways to understand your social audience

Here are a few strategies to help you delve into your social audience and mine them for insights to apply to your other marketing strategies.

Lean on social analytics for data-backed insights

Perhaps the best and most accurate way to understand your social audience lies is to use your analytics.

Virtually every social media platform comes with solid analytics functions as standard. These let you monitor and track everything from follower count increase and reach to post engagement and click-through rates.

But crucially, your analytics also let you understand your social audience on a deeper level too. From hard elements such as age, gender, location, and so on, to more variable, colourful elements like interests or social activity habits, your analytics speak depths about your social audience.

With this level of surgical insight into your target audience, it’s possible to create tailored marketing campaigns across all channels that speak to your audience not just as customers, but as individuals. As such, your campaigns will have more impact as a result.

For solopreneurs and startups, the analytics that come with your social platforms is enough to be getting by with. But for large or scaling companies, it’s worth investing in a dedicated social media analytics tool for deeper insights. 

Here at The Next Ad, we’ve created a Social Engagement Manager, which allows you to check all realtime performances of your social media accounts. Keyhole is another tool, that could help you glean meaning from your social channels and understand your customers better as a result.

Build and nurture a thriving customer community

Every business should take pains to create and nurture a thriving customer community. This is essentially a digital coterie centred around your brand. They share the same passions, hobbies, and interests, and come together under your brand.

It’s possible to nurture this community in a plethora of ways. Entice them in with free products, competitions, discounts, excellent customer service, and unique branding. But on social, the way to really engage these customers is with on-point social content.

Share insightful, interesting, or informative content that taps into your audience’s shared pain points and interests. Invite engagement by actively asking for your audience’s input, and respond to their comments when they do.

Be genuine and personable, and have conversations rather than one-way communication. It is this that creates a thriving customer community in 2020.

Crucially, use these conversations as an opportunity to learn more about your social audience.

Beyond sourcing their valuable insights into brand perception and product opinions, you can also learn more about their personal interests, hobbies, and pastimes. When you understand what else they care about, you can better hone your other marketing channel strategies to address those issues.

It’s also a great chance to understand how your audience speaks: the language they use, references, slang, and so on. Speaking in the same manner as your social audience lets you connect with them on a deeper, more meaningful level. Your customer community will become more genuine and cohesive as a result.

Look to influencers for tips and techniques you can copy

The role of influencers has changed dramatically over the years. Many influencers have come under fire of late, most notably (but not exclusively) those involved in the Fyre Festival scandal.

But despite this, influencers remain ubiquitous and are a valuable method of gleaning insight into your social audience online.

Identify influencers who are active within your business’ niche. Often this is common sense, but you could also monitor your followers online to see which influencers they follow, or use an influencer marketing platform to identify them based on keywords.

Trawl these followers’ social feeds and see what kind of content they post, what kind of engagement it receives, and what resonates most with their audience. Perhaps an insider video receives more engagement than a simple product flat lay, for instance.

Armed with this knowledge, you can understand what makes your audience tick on a deeper level. If they prefer a certain type of content, for instance, you could include this in your email newsletter, for example.

The tips above will give you a solid grounding for delving into your social audience and better understanding them as individuals, not generic consumers. Armed with these insights, you can better pivot the rest of your marketing to ensure it his the mark in 2020. Understand your audience, and you’ll understand how to market to them — it’s as simple as that.

Want to know more about targeting the right audience for your online marketing strategy? Download the free Audience Targeting white paper and learn all you need to know!