11 Mar Stay on Target With Social Media Marketing

In digital marketing, it’s not enough to publish quality content, breathtaking imagery, and desirable products if you’re not reaching the right audience. Most importantly, you need to be agile in your social media strategy—don’t target blindly. Social Spice Media shares the following ways you can aim for success through targeted marketing:

Aim To Hit the Bullseye

You might have a target audience in mind based on demographics like age, gender, location, income, and educational level but you can get much more specific. Your imagined audience has varied interests just like you do, so look for the overlap. For example, if you’re a travel agent, you would target people who are interested in traveling but you could also think outside the box and target people who speak multiple languages or have an interest in history. You might also consider attributes to rule out in your audience. The goal is to make your audience as specific as possible—you want to show your message to the people who are the most likely to engage with your brand. For networks like Instagram and Twitter, hashtags become more important in targeting but follow the same concept. The goal is to show up in the correct searches, not all of them. Having too many hashtags on a post in proportion to content can be overwhelming and annoying to your audience.

Title with Care

Titles and taglines are condensed and simplified summaries of your content. Whether it’s your blog or your entire website, this short and simple, series of words has to be click-worthy. Short and sweet is always best at 10 words or less. To appeal to a modern audience with a shortening attention span, one of the best strategies is using numbered listicles (ex: “10 Ways to Save Money”). Even if they aren’t numbered, lots of short sections with subtitles do well to hold and direct attention. Explanatory words like “this”, “what”, “which”, “when”, and “why” are also useful to draw our attention and speak to an audience directly (ex. Why Should I Invest in Social Media?). You might consider creating and testing multiple titles with your ads, or just brainstorming a list of titles to choose from for each piece of content. Buzzfeed is known for requiring writers to come up with 15 potential titles for each piece of content.

An Image is Worth a Thousand Words

As we discussed in our January blog, colorful and diversified images are key to attracting your audience. But you don’t want to go overboard either. A Logo should be simple but memorable; ideally two colors or less, with either the name of the company, acronym, or slogan incorporated. Too many colors, shapes, and variations will affect your logo’s memorability. For example, Target’s logo is comprised of only two colors and it’s just three concentric circles. Kohls’ logo presents itself with varying color schemes, but the style of the lettering is consistent, and the name of the store is the entire design. For cover images, testing multiple types of images can be useful. Try creating several different options such as an image with a person, an image with an animal, and a graphic to test which one has the highest click through rate (CTR). You might be surprised which images perform best—take note but don’t hesitate to change your strategy constantly.

It’s a Moving Target

Targeting a specific demographic might work perfectly one day and tank the next day. It’s crucial to your marketing strategy to check and adjust your targeting as often as possible. While you should take note of targeting that works well for your product, be aware that your audience is constantly evolving. Social Spice Media can help develop and manage your business’s social media presence by targeting the right audience and staying up-to-date with current trends. Do you know someone who could benefit from our services? Refer them to us today! Our team is eager to connect with businesses in any industry. We serve the local needs of Ventura County and Santa Barbara as well as anywhere in the United States.