Target audience
How to find their real target audience has been the marketing question since the beginning of marketing, and up until recently it has also been one of the most difficult questions to answer. Now people are looking to social media outlets to find their target audience. Facebook posts, tweets, and Google +1 (Google’s answer to the Facebook Like button), are letting us know what the masses really like, and with that we can easily analyze behavioral patterns and find out what kind of people we are advertising to.
Software to Help Find Your Target Audience
Of course no one out there has the time to manually trawl all of the social media sites out there to find their target audience. That’s why companies like Radian6 and Sysmosos are providing a digital ear to listen to all of the social media content out there and report its findings back to your company to assist in defining your target audience. Salesforce, one of the largest client database software programs in the world, recently acquired Radian6 so you can only imagine what kind of monster that is going to become, not only for finding your target audience, but managing your entire database of your clients information (future, past, and present) all in one stop.
According to an article on Media Two Point Oh, “these tools crawl the web looking for mentions of whatever is important to you: your brand name, industry keywords, product types, etc. When you look at your results over a period of time, it’s easy to tell where you should be in social media. If people are mostly talking about your brand or keywords on a particular platform, that’s where you should be.”
Now That You’ve Found Your Target Audience…
The obvious next step is taking this information and creating attention grabbing ways of reaching your target audience. Sometimes mentions about your brand is not necessarily positive. This is not a bad thing, you can actually convert these naysayers into believers and make them a part of your target audience. All you have to do as a marketer is let them know that you are interested in what they have to say. Converse with them, ask them for suggestions, take them seriously. That’s what social media is all about, its two way communication with both your target audience and even those that may support your competition. The goal is to become more human and less like spam, your social media target audience will always appreciate that.
Interacting with your Target Audience
There are a lot of interesting ways to interact with your target audience and at the same time build a good reputation for your company. Imagine if you’ve discovered a major influencer within your industry that speaks a lot about your brand. Pay attention not only to what they are saying about your brand, but other aspects of their online dialogue. If one of these people in your target audience supports a charity, offer to sponsor them or help with their fundraising efforts. Not only does your brand now have a face and a name, but also a heart, and that will go a long way for your company’s reputation and your target audience’s view of your brand’s image.
Using software like Radian6 and others to help find your target audience through the social networking medium can work wonders for your brand’s image and make sure that you are really reaching out to the right folks.