How To Use Social Media Marketing More Efficiently

Social media marketing is coming into its own as a hyper-efficient platform for your advertising campaigns. Let’s say you want to run an ad in a newspaper, on the radio or on TV — there’s no guarantee that people who see or hear the ad will actually be interested in what you’re offering. This is because you can’t control the audience targeting, but with social media you can. Here’s a basic guide on how you can create highly efficient social media marketing campaigns.

Targeted Demographics

The great thing about many social media platforms, especially Facebook, is that when users register they can provide information about themselves on their profile. Depending on the platform, they can include the following:

• Gender — male or female
• Age — how old they are
• Location — what city or state they live in
• Career — their job, and maybe even their income

Think about that for a moment. If you have market research that tells you who your optimal target demographic is, you can fully cater your advertising on social media to them. You can then build your ad campaign so only people that meet that demographic criteria see the ads. This lets your ads reach their maximum efficiency, while allowing you to maximize your reach.

Consumer Interests

But wait, it gets better. Let’s say you want to market a product to people in that demographic. Even the best market research that identify what groups have the most interest in your product will only be making an educated guess based on percentages. Some social media platforms, such as Facebook, allow you to target ads to people who specifically like or show interest in products like yours. Here’s how:

• Listed interests — if they have specifically said in their profile or activity that they like your type of product
• Pages they like — on Facebook they might have ‘liked’ the profiles of other businesses and people associated with your type of product
• Who they follow — if they follow other companies, businesses, or high profile users and experts for your type of product

So not only can you target your ads according to the optimal demographic, but you can also further refine your targeting to people who have shown specific signs that they already like the type of product you sell.

Buying Intentions

But wait, it still gets even better! Not only can you target your ads so people who express general interest in your type of product, but you can further refine it to people who have shown signals that they might be actively shopping for that type of product. Here’s how it works:

• Searches — the person has recently been searching on social media for businesses and products like yours
• Activity — they’ve specifically said in their tweets and posts that they’re shopping for a product like yours and asking for help or reviews
• Likes & follows — similar to general interests, people who recently start liking or following businesses or products likely have buying interest

The great thing about focusing your campaigns in this way is that it makes them much more efficient. Rather than spending thousands of dollars for a monthly ad campaign in a newspaper, magazine, TV or radio station, you can spend maybe a few hundred dollars for short campaigns. You can start and stop them daily, you can adjust them on the fly or test elements so they always perform optimally.

With all that being said, while knowing demographics, consumer interests and their intentions are important, you still need someone to put your plan into action and manage all of your social media channel to be truly effective. The team at Third Angle would be thrilled to be your social media experts.