HCSS has also experimented with advertising on social media. It tried a three-month Facebook look-alike campaign and monitored the conversions and CPL. At the end, Moss decided that the CPL for its B2B market was way too high to sustain. On the other hand, a sponsored content campaign on LinkedIn drove more targeted customers at a lower CPL, even though the cost per click was five to ten times as high as on Facebook.
Both Briscoe and Moss have important insights to share. Briscoe reminds people to keep posting and experimenting. “Don’t be afraid to not have the perfect content because that doesn’t exist. You can’t please everyone with just a single post,” he says.
Adds Moss, “Always remember that your true north is your customer; they are your guiding compass and will tell you all you want to know. You just have to ask.”
Following is a list of sites that make up HCSS’s web presence:
www.facebook.com/HCSS4Construction
https://twitter.com/hcsssupport
www.instagram.com/ibuildamerica/?hl=en
www.linkedin.com/company/i-build-america
Chapter 3
Plotting Your Social Media Marketing Strategy
IN THIS CHAPTER
In Chapter 1 of this minibook, we talk about making the business case for social media marketing, looking at the question of whether you should or shouldn’t get involved. That chapter is about strategy, goals, and objectives — this one is about tactics. It helps you decide which social media services best fit your marketing objectives and your target market.
Let your customers and prospects drive your selection of social media alternatives. To see the best return on your investment in social media, you need to try to use the same social media as they do. This principle is the same one you apply to all your other marketing and advertising efforts. Social media is a new tactic, not a new world.
In this chapter, we show how to use online market research to assess the match between your target markets and various social media outlets. After you do that, you’re ready to start filling out your own Social Media Marketing Plan, which appears at the end of this chapter.
Locating Your Target Market Online
Nothing is more important in marketing than identifying and understanding your target audience (or audiences). After you can describe your customers’ and prospects’ demographic characteristics, where they live, and what social media they use, you’re in a position to focus your social marketing efforts on those people most likely to buy your products or services. (Be sure to include the description of your target market in your Social Media Marketing Goals statement, discussed in Book 1, Chapter 1.)
Because social media techniques focus on inexpensive ways to reach niche markets with specific messages, they’re tailor-made for a guerrilla-marketing approach. As with all guerrilla-marketing activities, target one market at a time.
Don’t dilute your marketing budget or labor by trying to reach too many audiences at a time. People still need to see your message or brand name at least seven times to remember it. Trying to boost yourself to the forefront of everyone’s mind all at once is expensive.
Don’t let setting priorities among niches paralyze you. Your choice of niches usually doesn’t matter. If you aren’t sure, go first for what seems to be the biggest market or the easiest one to reach.
Segmenting Your B2C Market
If you have a business-to-consumer (B2C) company, you can adapt the standard tools of market segmentation, which is a technique to define various niche audiences by where they live and how they spend their time and money. The most common types of segmentation are
Demographics
Geographic location
Life-stage-based purchasing behavior
Psychographics or lifestyle
Affinity or interest groups
These categories affect not only your social media tactics but also your graphics, message, content, offers, and every other aspect of your marketing.