Do you know who your potential clients are, what they do and what motivates and inspires them?
If you don’t, you’re missing a huge opportunity!
Whether your target market is an individual or a business, to connect with your audience, you need to speak their language.
This makes it important to quit the broad stroke marketing approach and instead get niche specific. After all, not everyone is your perfect client. Stop speaking in generalities and start making a targeted effort with your content marketing.
Scared to niche down in your business? Worried that you should cast a wider net? Don’t be.
Gone are the days of speaking to everyone and anyone. As David Siteman Garland says in his book “Smarter, Faster, Cheaper: Non-Boring, Fluff-free Strategies for Marketing and Promoting Your Business,”
“If your message is vanilla and one-size-fits-all, people aren’t going to respond because they are busy listening to someone else’s message that is spot on for them. Today smart businesses select their target market and direct their marketing efforts to those people and those people only.” source: Forbes
So what can narrowing your niche and developing a targeted content marketing strategy do for you? It can allow you to…
- Expand into new markets
- Increase brand reputation
- Generate additional prospects
- Decrease current customer service support while increasing the value you offer
- Build a community of raving fans
- Extend the life of any marketing campaign
- Turn an event into a lifetime marketing return
- Decrease your current advertising spend while increasing results
Below are tips to help you develop a targeted social media content marketing strategy that will unlock untapped potential for your business!
Tips for a Social Media Content Marketing Strategy
1. Know Your Market
Now that you know not everyone is your ultimate customer or client, your first step is to define who they are. This is where you’re going to get hyper-specific.
You’re going to build a customer persona and identify what problems you solve. Then determine what solutions you can provide to ease their pain, make their life easier or simplify the buying process.
How to Get to Know Your Market
First realize…
- You must be laser beam focused when describing your market.
- It’s easier to earn business through targeted marketing.
- It’s great to get into the heads of your potential buyers, but even better to get into their hearts.
- You’ll need to put yourself in the shoes of your buyer to truly understand their needs.
Now get clear on who they are…
Want to get to know your consumer? Here’s a great example from Hubspot. The buyer persona below is Marketing Mary, a representation of their target market.
As you can see, they’ve included important details about her goals, challenges, and why she would want to connect with the company. You can mimic this breakdown, using it as a guide to get clear on who you’re speaking with.
2. Identify the Purpose of Your Content
Identifying the purpose of your content marketing is your next step. Your purpose should include clearly set goals, a mission, vision and objectives.
A strongly defined purpose will give you a clear understanding of who you’re writing for and why. Always ensure that your content purpose is in alignment with the overall core objectives, and marketing strategy, of your business.
To do this, understand the needs of your target market and the problems you solve. Below are two steps to help you get started.
Know the Problems You Solve
Step 1:
Create your buyer or audience persona – know their exact demographics, needs, wants and desires. (see above)
Know the Value You Bring
Step 2:
Answer the questions below –
- What is your skill set, area of expertise or specialized experience?
- What can you teach or train others to do?
- What resources, tools or information can you share that will
- improve the lives of your audience?
- Does your product, service, tool or system fill a void within your industry?
3. Commit to Quality, Not Quantity
While it should go without saying, it’s always worth repeating. Great content is the core of your social media and content marketing strategy.
To ensure the quality of your content, determine your process for producing, polishing and publishing it. How frequently will you post and how much time can you commit to marketing that content?
Keep in mind that the quality of your content is a direct reflection on your business. This isn’t an area where you want to over commit and under deliver.
Create a content calendar to keep you focused and on track. There’s nothing worse than putting a content marketing strategy in place only to get derailed by a lack of planning. As Winston Churchill said,
“He who fails to plan is planning to fail“
4. Pay Attention to What’s Working (and what’s not)
Ever wish you could see directly into the thoughts of your potential buyer? Wouldn’t it be great if you knew exactly what they wanted and then could provide it every time?
You can, or at least you can come close by paying attention to your analytics, metrics and goals.
Numbers don’t lie and will always give you the guidance and direction you need. Measure your conversations, interaction, engagement, and shares through tools like:
- Google Analytics
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
Know what content is hitting the mark and what’s a miss. The bottom line is that no matter what tool you use to measure your content marketing efforts, you must commit to a review process.
5. Know Your Sales Process (and Call to Action)
Before you can create an effective social media content marketing strategy, you need to know your sales process. How do you move people through your marketing funnel and where is client acquisition actually happen?
Ask yourself a few questions…
- What actions are you taking daily that produce results?
- Where are your leads coming from?
- Are they the right type of leads?
- Do your leads convert?
- How are you using social to support your sales process?
- Are you using a clear Call to Action (CTA) in all of your content?
- Have you tested each of your CTA’s to determine what’s converting?
Once you know the answer to this, you can clearly articulate your value and the next steps you want consumers to take.
Final Thoughts
There are many benefits to defining your niche and speaking directly to their needs.
How can you better position your business across social media to welcome new customers? And how can you use social media to endear customers to your small business?
Answer those questions and unlocking the benefits and power of social media in your small business.
If you’re eager to expand your use of social media and truly tap into all that it has to offer, join me for a FREE webinar where we’ll share secrets to, “Monetizing Social Media and Dominating Your Market” on Tuesday, September 30th at 9am PT | 12pm ET.
Learn how you can gain prospects, referrals and connections to grow your business through targeted online efforts. Join us here!
Hi Rebekah,
I am struggling with my social media content strategy for lead generation but your final thought that there are many benefits to defining your niche and speaking directly to their needs make me revisit my strategy. Now I am thinking to target a niche
Hey Rebekah,
Yes, It is important to optimise the tweets and the blog articles while creating one’s social network profile by using the essential elements of SEO such as keywords but, it should be unique, self-generated content to engage a vast audience and to drive more traffic.
One can also post content on another social site and by adding some link. The readers can click the link that will redirect them to another site to read the full content.
Hii Rebekah Radice,
Thanks for sharing with us…Social media content marketing is an important part of the success of any small business!
Social media has a definite, critical role in your content marketing strategy. In fact, it is one of the building blogs of your entire campaign. There are many different aspects of your content marketing strategy that involve social media and it is very important that you thoroughly understand how to use it most effectively.
It will help you when it comes to creating content as well as deciding exactly how to present your content for the biggest bang! If you aren’t certain about how to go about doing that, you can get some help from available tools, which have proven to be extremely effective.
Regards,
Rommel Asuit
Hii, your post is very worthy. A complete lot of diverse types of writing will be believed as content and accepted as such. The only rule is that the content must be relevant to the destination audience and that it retain the likelihood of being capable of being disseminated over social media.
Hye…buddy….
Very nice post. i really appreciate your efforts. keep up the good work….
These are awesome tips to shine in social media…Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. These strategies help us lot to create better marketing on social media and enlarges our network.
I’m sure this will help a lot to me and to other readers as well. I’ll follow your advice for sure!!!!!!
These are all excellent tips for social media strategy! Thanks for sharing! I really like your “Quality, Not Quantity” not tip. Utilizing social media is so important to connect with current customers and gain new ones.
In reality… this is an awesome article. I generally advise individuals to invest 80% of their energy before creating content for their gathering of people… and this article is by all accounts affirming that straightforward truth. Much obliged to you!
I just Capzool to find targeted content. Saves me lots of time.
Great post! I was taking notes as I read your article. Thank you for writing it.
Content is the most important strategy of digital marketing which leads to traffic to the site and the marketing of content is very useful for the development of the blogs and the above content shows that for a good blog content is so much important thing to be nice one .
Hii…Rebakah….
Very nice post. i really appreciate your efforts. keep up the good work….
These are awesome tips to shine in social media…Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us. These strategies help us lot to create better marketing on social media and enlarges our network.
I’m sure this will help a lot to me and to other readers as well. I’ll follow your advice for sure!!!!!!
Have a nice day ahead……
Hey Rebekah
Great post and well detailed!
I am having really good success at the moment with instagram and it is helping me with conversions, but doing everything manually is a drain.
Do you know of any good scheduling tools?
Thanks,.
Josh
Hi Rebekah,
Thanks for sharing. It’s really interesting. I am a real beginner when it comes to social media marketing. What is the best way to start a conversation with your target audience and maximize the engagement?
Thanks,
Ksenia
Hi Rebekah,
I really enjoyed this post.
Honestly,this is my very first time here,on your Blog.
But, it is worth reading. I’ve already bookmarked you.
I think you are so true regarding the content creation.
Before doing such, we must know who our audience is.
If not,it is no point in creating such content.
Keep up the great work.
Great post, I agree with a lot of this especially the section on quality over quantity. The better the content the more effective it will be.
I also think that people should be social these days and comment on other people’s social media – it’s called social media for a reason. Years ago everyone used to comment on posts etc but these days it seems to be few and far between.
You know I agree with that Chris. You have to get yourself into the conversation if you want others to engage with you. Blogging and social media definitely aren’t a one-way conversation.
Hi Rebekah,
It took me a while but when I trusted #3 my blogging and online business life changed. People respond well to quality content and don’t respond much at all to anything else. It’s a basic law. If you create value you will become valuable in the eyes of your audience. If you short change folks, you’ll be short changed.
I’m pulling back on posting going forward; not because my quality is taking a hit, but because I have so many eBooks to promote I need to see that each is getting it’s time in the sun…..here in paradise, in Fiji 😉
I uploaded #4 today to selz, and I need to write a post next week but I’ll still promoting 1-3…..all about letting my quality grow, and of course, and aggressive outreach campaign….so I can help others and build my network.
On social, it really is all about quality. Make an impact where you show up and you will become memorable.
Rebekah, what a fab post. Thanks so much. Tweeting soon.
Ryan
Hi Ryan! I love your quote here, “If you create value you will become valuable in the eyes of your audience. If you short change folks, you’ll be short changed.” That is so true!
If you want to become a valuable resource, share valuable content. It really is that simple.
And a big congrats on the latest eBook!
This content is rock-solid @Rebekah. I would like to share it on my blog.
Hi Eminike! You are welcome to share as long as you link back to my article as the original source. Thanks for your support!
Hi Rebekah,
Well written and explained. Thanks. But I guess it will help more with actual case study. Alas, there are many articles that say ‘what to do’, but not many on how exactly put the pans to action, much less on what happens when you put those to action. IMHO, it’s not difficult to put together a ‘what to do’ post collating information already available on the web. I don’t want to be too argumentative but that’s how I feel.
Case study can help Partha, but mindset is a big part of it. So is understanding your own use of social media.
Until you know why you’re using social media within your business, it’s very difficult to understand the how. Most businesses bypass the why and move straight into the how, which creates an inconsistent (and often haphazard) strategy.
Yes I agree, Rebekah. Appreciate your explaining.
Thanks for this insight. I think the two crucial factors are 1.) Know your audience and 2.) Know what and how to move them into action.
Indeed…this is a fantastic article. I always tell people to spend 80% of their time before producing content for their audience…and this article seems to be confirming that simple fact. Thank you!
Hi James! A content strategy is an excellent way to spread your company message, but it’s going to be tough to support it if you don’t know who you’re talking to. Sounds like you’re saying the same thing!
I thought I had a pretty good handle on using social media to support my sales process and lead acquisition strategy (until) I re-read your article. Definitely going to reserve a seat for http://socialsuccessacademy.com/ and learn what and how you and Sabrina will reveal improving social media content marketing strategy.
I really like how you capped of your piece with the video and embedded it into your article. This is such an effective SMM technique! I’d definitely do the same if I came across as well as YOU do on video 😉
Hi Neil! Oh, I think you have a pretty good handle on social. You’re doing more within your business than just about anybody I know. Keep on testing the waters, I love watching what’s working for you!
Hi Rebekah.
I love your articles, but I think this is my first comment on your blog.
I thought the early about knowing the problems I solve is very powerful. Without knowing the emotional trigger(s) for somebody to take action, it’s difficult to write for that person.
I find that personal stories and struggles appeal to me, and I have some of my experiences planned for my upcoming posts.
Nathan.
Hi Nathan! Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by and comment.
Great point about emotional triggers. If you don’t know what people care about, there’s no way to speak to it. Glad to hear you’re sharing personal experiences. That’s the real way to make connections and build relationships.