It is time for our second post of our social media tip series. Our last tip blog post handled one of the most discussed and also one of the most complex social media topics, namely the best time to post on social media. This post takes on the widely discussed matter of creating remarkable content for your target audience.
Gone are the days where you just spread out your content on your social media channels or blog. Welcome now to the days of tailored content, because nothing is as important for creating remarkable content as knowing who your target audience is.
That means evaluating your audience becomes a crucial part of every social media and content marketing strategy. Instead of just guessing who it is you want to reach with your content, it is necessary to ask the right questions before publishing. Straight from the gut approaches don’t work anymore; If you want to achieve success, it is inevitable to take numbers into consideration.
No data, no clear focus, no success.
Please, don’t blindly assume that you know who your audience is without digging deeper into your customers’ needs and questions. The first thing to do is to get insights on your audience so that you can create the perfect content for them. So let’s take a look at one method of how we can achieve this.
A possible way to do this is to take a look at your users and their questions. To give you an idea what your clients want from you, you could ask yourself: What are my customers asking me? Do they have specific questions about my service? By evaluating this you already may be able to discover what your potential customers or fans are asking themselves about you.
For example, by detecting that one specific question that is asked over and over again, you can already see a pattern. Let’s take an example from the world of SaaS companies. A question that is frequently asked by their customers is: “What happens after my trial has ended?” So to avoid answering this question repeatedly, you can either create a FAQ blog post or pin a tweet to your wall that exactly answers this question.
A software that will help you to identify such recurring questions is a social media listening tool. By implementing social media listening to your overall analysis, you can directly know what and when people are talking about your brand across different social networks.
Knowing beforehand what your customers want to know from you is important, but equally important is where your customers are coming from. Here is where a powerful Facebook tool comes in handy. Being a Facebook admin and having access to Facebook Insights (only the admin of a Facebook page can access this private data) gives you the ability to access your Facebook Insights data. This gives you the chance to take a look at data of your page that is not visible to others, like the demographics (e.g. gender & location) of your fans.
Insights give you the powerful option to learn more about the age, the gender and the location of your Facebook fans. Through these metrics you can determine what content your specific target audiences are interested in.
That means it would be a wise idea to tailor the content according to the demographics of this specific target group. For example, knowing more about the age of your Facebook fans can show you what they are interested in. Let’s assume that you have a mainly german-speaking teenage community. In this case, following a video content strategy could be a wise idea because younger viewers watch 2.5 times more internet videos than conventional television.
Now we know that our younger audience likes to watch videos, but knowing that they are from Germany can also provide another benefit. This information can give you an idea of when you should post your content because it is more likely that they are more active on Facebook at a different time than your fans in the United States.
Looking at Facebook Insights data is a powerful source for you to learn even more about your audience.
Influencer marketing is one of the interesting topics in digital marketing at the moment. Therefore, it is also important to take a look at your key influencers. By identifying who these people are, you can not only recognize unknown competitors, but you can also prevent damage if an influencer is posting deterring comments on your page. On the other hand, it also gives you the possibility to find users that really like you and bind them even closer to you.
Observe, measure and analyze: these are the three most important things we want to leave you with. They will not only help you to optimize your social media performance and content creation on a long term perspective, but also helps you to create remarkable content. Never forget that all three of these things are ongoing projects and crucial key elements of improving your social media success. One last takeaway for you, since you are already analyzing your own social media and content marketing strategy it might be helpful to take a look at your competitors. Benchmarking yourself with the performance of your competitors, gives you an even better view on where you stand in terms of content success.