Chapter 5: Define Your Target Audience
Marketing and advertising are businesses in and of themselves. The idea of
selling products is an age-old business that thrived long before the creation of
social media. Marketing firms still exist and have traded lots of their
advertising in newspapers and magazines for online ads. Still, it is necessary
to have a marketing plan to capitalize on the needs of your audience and to
capture your target market. Just because the medium has changed doesn’t
mean the content and timing need to fall by the wayside. Do your homework,
find your target audience and play into their needs.
In general, any business is either out to sell a physical product or a service.
The idea of service is very broad and could include anything from personal
training in person at a brick and mortar location to providing information
through a website, like a blog.
The goal for most bloggers is to put out information that is helpful and incites
the desire to learn more, or change. For example, if a blogger is passionate
about saving the rainforest, their primary goal will be to drive their followers
to propel political change. Not every business is selling something for money,
and that is a very important distinction to make. Just as well, not every
business has money to spend on advertising, like a non-profit. Therefore,
their marketing goals online will be much different.
The first step to a successful Facebook campaign will be discovering your
target audience. Most likely, you have already started a page to promote your
business. Facebook has a handy feature that will show you page statistics.
Simply click on the ‘Insights’ tab on the top of the page toolbar. From here
you can analyze each post and how well it performed. You will find stats on
how many people the post reached, and how many people liked and engaged
in the post. You will also find stats on how your page did as a whole through
time.
The page has a list of each of your posts, how many likes and how many
shares it received. What you want to pay attention to most is the organic
reach. This is the amount of people who saw your post because someone they
are friends with either liked or shared the page. When you think of organic,
