05 Apr 4 Best Practices for Tapping into New Social Audiences
For businesses and brands, there may come a time where you need to market to a new audience- whether it’s to tap into the younger millennial audience or to target a niche audience due to a new product or service being offered. Tapping into a new audience on your social channels can sound like a daunting task, but with these 4 best practices, you can effectively grow a new audience while keeping your current fans happy.
Research Your Audience
First, you need to learn about your new target audience. It’s helpful to understand the basics, like age, location, marital status and household income. But taking the time to learn what makes them tick will help you engage with them more successfully. Look at their interests, affiliations and habits. What evokes emotion for them? These are what we like to call “Passion Points.” An example of this is, say you find out your new audience loves recipes; see if there’s a relevant way you can work that passion for food or dining into your content to pique their interest and provide value to them.
Explore New Channels
To reach your new audience properly, you should see which channels they’re the most active on. It’s possible they’re predominantly on a channel you aren’t utilizing and you will need to decide if you can activate effectively there. (#ProTip: If they’re on Twitter and Instagram, be sure to have a robust hashtag strategy to further amplify your content.)
For example, let’s say you’re trying to reach a small niche group, such as Administrative Assistants. Using a channel like LinkedIn might be your best bet for reaching them when they’re in a business mindset.
Tap Into Other Networks
It’s been shown that a brand message shared through an influencer can be a very effective form of marketing. Instead of using your current owned social channels, explore hiring influencers to do the work for you. They’re particularly great because you can pick and choose the influencers you’d like to work with based on their follower demo or area of influence. (Shameless plug: Interested in influencer marketing? Check out www.Carusele.com for some awesome programs.)
Create Content Carefully
Now that you’ve figured out what your new audience cares about, it’s time to create content that will resonate with them to attract them to your channel, product or service. The key here is creating content that won’t alienate your current audience, while also attracting your new target audience. See what passion points your two audiences have in common and design content around that. This way, you’re keeping your fans happy while also attracting new ones.
If you find they don’t have many passion points in common, you can also utilize dark posts to reach just the new audience. This means you would create a post and promote it to the new target audience, but not put it live on the page. This would ensure your current audience doesn’t see the content that might alienate them.
Have you ever had to target to a new audience in social? Tell us what worked and what didn’t below!
