Nearly all kinds of businesses are getting on social media platforms like Facebook. However, some businesses may be jumping the gun. Companies selling specific kinds of products may be going too general with their approaches, and adopting social media too early.
In general, experts would agree social media marketing strategies often suffer from a kind of default ‘dumbing down.’ It’s not that businesses shouldn’t get this kind of visibility and exposure on the Internet. However, marketers are often lulled into complacency by the ease with which they can generate a Facebook page or post, or publish something to Wordpress. While marketing teams that adopt these new tech approaches might have fun high-fiving and hitting the “That was easy” button, they can face challenges later where too much of a generic campaign doesn’t provide the necessary results.
Identify a Specific Audience: The “Cheese Principle”
All products have target audiences. That’s one thing that’s not inherently plugged into a Facebook business profile. Take the example of one of the most basic commodities around: cheese. If you’re a marketer sitting around a table trying to come up with a Facebook strategy for cheese, your first impulse may be a simple orange wedge with a commodity title and a flashy package of images of various wheels and slices of cheese. This is the point where marketers need to think again and refine their ideas about what to put online.
Most businesses sell particular kinds of cheese:
- Are the products speciality cheeses?
- Do they sell sharp cheddar?
- Other particular flavor profiles?
- Or lighter blends for dieters?
All of these will benefit from radically different social media campaigns that don’t just use generic or “cheesy” (pardon the pun) information. If that’s true for cheese, it’s much more true for that range of products that are much more oriented toward a particular audience.
When getting people to buy ecigs, for example, it’s not a good idea to start a broad spectrum of social media campaigns that will draw comers of all ages and all walks of life. The business wants to attract smokers, not anybody else. That’s why orienting a campaign toward a specific tone, putting lots of detailed information about products on the web, and restricting a commercial appeal to a specific audience is so often recommended, but not as frequently done. If you’re interested in reading more , you can get more solid social media strategy tips from Mashable.
Starting to craft a more specific social media appeal is just the tip of the iceberg. With this idea in place, marketers can do a lot of deep research.
- What are the particular things an audience wants to learn about?
- What are the demographics that might determine how products are presented?
Fortune 500 and blue chip businesses use big data analytics to answer these questions, but smaller businesses need to rely on skilled professionals who “work by their wits.” A stripped-down social media strategy is a good way to start building a smarter ad campaign.
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