How To Use Social Media Marketing To Better Understand Your Target Audience

23 May How To Use Social Media Marketing To Better Understand Your Target Audience

Not that long ago, the entire concept of “social media marketing” didn’t even exist in mainstream conversations. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter were seen as unprofitable entities that did not provide a particularly intriguing value proposition for companies looking to expand their small business marketing plan.

However, Facebook and (to a lesser extent) Twitter have grown up a lot since their early incarnations. Today, Facebook is a massive international company that reported over $2 billion in revenue in Q3 2013 alone. With over a billion active global users and nearly all of their revenue coming from advertisements, there clearly is something worth looking into when generating a small business marketing plan.

What makes Facebook such a valuable place to advertise?

One of the major benefits of advertising on Facebook is the massive amount of data analytics that are provided to advertisers. Whenever a company places an ad on Facebook, they can see exactly how many clicks and impressions that ad received, how many times those impressions or clicks converted into sales, and the cost per customer. Best of all, Facebook allows multiple advertisements to be running simultaneously, so a company advertising can see which specific ads are working and which are not. In addition to allowing the company to augment and fine-tune their marketing strategy.

The other piece of Facebook advertising that makes the company so popular with small businesses is the ability to target advertisements based on very specific demographic criteria. For example, who an advertisement reaches can be narrowed down by age, gender, marital status, location, specific interests, alma mater, etc. This means that the effectiveness of each advertisement can be compared to specific demographics data, making it incredibly simple for the company to see which marketing angles work best, as well as who exactly their target market is or should be.

Leveraging the information gained from Facebook advertising

While the information that can be learned from Facebook advertising certainly can help a company create more cost-effective advertisements on Facebook, the benefits of this information do not have to be limited to simply social media marketing campaigns.

Savvy businesses will take the highly detailed demographics information and apply it to their overall business model, including more traditional advertisements such as radio ads. For example, if a company found that the Facebook advertisements that resonated most deeply with potential customers involved promotional discounts for college students in Southern California, that company could produce radio advertisements that offered discounts, while playing those advertisements in Southern California media markets that had large college student populations.

Ultimately, social media marketing is a great way to reach a specific type of audience and gain detailed information about how effective or ineffective a particular angle will be. However, the true value of social media marketing comes from the fact that the customers being reached on social media are the same customers that listen to the radio on their way to work or school, and are probably paying more attention to what comes on their radio than text-based advertisements on the Facebook page.