Social Media Marketing Guide – Part Two
We talked a little bit in the first part of the social media marketing guide about Avatars. They’re not just important for James Cameron, they can make the rest of us a lot of money as well.
An Avatar is trendy Internet speak for a Customer Profile. In order to make online advertising work for us effectively, the most important thing to know is exactly who we are advertising to. If we know who our people are, then we know:
- How to speak to them
- When to speak to them
- Where to speak to them.
Start Somewhere
In order to develop an Avatar, we have to start somewhere. The idea is that we are creating a Persona, a description of the ideal customer that if we could choose, we’d like to work with. We need to try to define every characteristic, in as much detail as possible. Obviously Avatars are not actually real people, but the more work we put into developing an Avatar; narrowing down their likes, dislikes et cetera, the more likely we are to actually find them online. The world is an enormous place, with billions of people, and somewhere out there, there’s every possibility that our ideal customer actually exists.
Pivot?
And as we are going through this process of developing Avatars, it’s entirely possible that we will realize that the person we thought you wanted to work with has too many pitfalls. If we realize that, then it’s a good time to change direction slightly and find someone else.
The way that we start this process, is to get a piece of paper and a pen, and then write down the characteristics of the people we’d like to work with.
- Do we want to work them on a daily basis?
- Do we want to be able to set something up for them and then the see them again?
- Do we want to sell them something just one time, or many times, over and over again?
And do we want them to be easy to deal with, do we care?
- Will we have that much interaction with them?
- Do we need them to be in a specific place, because what we do as a service and we can only offer it within a certain radius of where we live?
- Do we sell products?
- Can we sell them online, or would we have to sell them out of a bricks and mortar establishment?
What’s our USP?
Then we need to consider why these people would actually want to work with us? Us rather than someone else who does something similar to us. What do we offer, or what could we offer that would answer their desires and needs?
Because another important part of selling to people that we don’t know is that despite not knowing them, we need to know what it is they’re looking for before we can either create the product they need or provide the solution they want. In order to do this we need to take our avatar, and understand what really makes them tick.
Keywords
What words are our ideal customers typing into the search bar when they are looking for what we intend to provide for them? When are they doing this? Are they just looking around? Or have they reached the point where they have to make a decision, and commit to pay for something? What has brought them to this point of decision and more importantly for us, purchase? Why are they doing it today? Why have they not done it before now?
Every decision that was ever made was made between two or more options at least one of which was the best option. And often these decisions are only ever made at a point of no return of some sort. Do we know what that point is?
If we can answer all the questions that we’ve posed above, then we can write out the description of our avatar.
At this point it might be worth considering whatever groups they might belong to, which shops they might shop at, what newspapers they might read. The reason that this is important is that one the fastest ways of finding our ‘tribe’ is to look on Facebook. In order to look for them on Facebook, it helps to know what kind of thing our ideal customer will be looking for on Facebook.
Join the groups
If we can consider all the above, then we can start looking around, putting our self in their shoes and finding the places that they hang out. If we can do this, and then join the groups that they have already joined, we get to listen to their concerns, their thoughts, their needs, their wants and their desires. It might be that they aspire to something that we can help them with. It might be they have a problem that we can solve.
Either way ,if we are where they are, listening to them discuss what they want and need, then we can gather enough information to talk to them (via a Facebook advert) in a way that they will understand, in a place where they’re already hanging out, at a time when we know that they’re looking for what we give them. It’s a simple, if convoluted process. But it works.
The Internet has got some AMAZING free resources, and if you have the time and the energy to learn how to use them, then that research will reward you abundantly. You’re welcome to download our Free Guide – How to get the most out of your social media marketing.
If, however, you can’t squeeze any more hours into your day, but you still want to get involved, then you can pay-to-play by engaging an online advertising agency do the work for you. Check out the services we can provide – we hope that you’ll find them useful.