Develop A Targeted Social Media Content Marketing Strategy

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!

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, a 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 9 am PT | 12 pm ET.

Learn how you can gain prospects, referrals, and connections to grow your business through targeted online efforts. Join us here!