When you are setting up your business and defining your business strategy you need to think about who your customers are. This will mean defining the profile of your customers. Once you have done this then targeting and marketing becomes so much easier as you can tailor your message to the relevant people. Take Facebook for example! On Facebook you can spend lots of money building up an audience just to get the numbers and then find that those people who like your page have no interest in your product at all. Ten thousand irrelevant likes are worth a lot less than 1,000 relevant ones. If you are going to spend time talking to an audience make sure it’s an audience that wants to listen.

The beauty of technology

Years ago you used to place an ad in the paper and choose the best place for your product or service. If you were aiming it at men you may have put the ad on the sports pages. If you were targeting women you may have used the weekend magazines. This was as targeted as you could get. Low and behold enter the age of Social Media and all of a sudden the bar is raised. Now not only can you choose the gender of your target audience but you can choose age, ethnicity, geographic location and so much more down to their interests based on what their online habits say about them. Now you can spend £5 on a Facebook ad and reach a couple of thousand people that you define by the exact criteria you put in. Imagine though if you don’t know who your customers are. How do you then target them?

Build a better audience

By defining the market place of your product/service not only will you know who to target but you will save yourself a lot of time and money. Once you have invested the time to work out who they are you can then build the right audience and use applications like the Copycat tool on Facebook. You can target a new audience based on the audience you already have. This will save you time and effort letting Facebook do the work for you whilst you get on with the day to day things that need doing. Being able to save time and money like this was so much harder for businesses to achieve ten years ago when it was more a case of throwing enough mud to make some stick.

Keeping that audience engaged

One you have a built a community whether that’s Facebook, Twitter, Linked In or one of the other many platforms available you need to keep them engaged. Don’t use your pages to constantly sell to those people but build a connection between them and your brand. When they are ready to buy they are then more likely to buy from you.