Where's My Audience?

After finishing this recent post, one of my colleagues in the Event industry,  sent me an E-mail that consisted of two things: a great compliment on the article and a very thought provoking question that resulted from this same post.  It seems that her efforts in actively participated in social media communities had been quite successful in netting her an audience of other like-minded business owners.  Although understanding the importance of  the B2B relationship, her question was:  "Where do I find my consumer audience"? 

My first response to this was an introspective - "... hummm.  What a great question!  And, what a even greater blog post this will make!"  The reality of it is that the answer to this question maked for great fodder for many blog posts.  I will attempt to give a shortened version - touching on just a few tactics...

The process and strategy for finding your audience on social media sites is much like the research that goes into target marketing.  To effectively locate (and market) to your audience, you must put in the time/research required to be able to succinctly discribe 'who your customer is'.  The ability to successfully locate your audience in the world of social media, goes far beyond understanding the usual demographic and geographic description.  It is imperative that you understand what psychographic and generographic characteristics motivate your audience.  That is to say, what is their communication style ?,  what devices do they utilize to access their platforms of choice? and what sites warrant the attention?  In general, what are their interests?

 

You can start your search in a number of ways.  You may want to start your search by asking trusted industry colleagues, who share your target audience, the above questions.  By soliciting the assistance of a colleague who does not share your same geographical territory should decrease the competitive factor.

A second source of locating your audience can be found in your industry publications.  Industry publications are invaluable resources for ascertaining, not only general information about your audience, but also, providing statistical profiles of  factors that influence their buying motivation, convey their concerns and interests, how they spend their time, what issues they are facing, with whom do they associate and what their aspirations are. 

Once you have created a general outline of your audience, you can more easily select the social media channels to target. 

What tools and/or strategies have you successfully used to locate your audience?  Let's talk about what has worked for you?

Social Media + Engagement = Increased Financial Performance

 {pic via here::special thanx}

The Altimeter Group, released a study earlier this year, in July- titled “ENGAGEMENTdb: Deep Brand Engagement Correlates with Financial Performance.”
The study looked at  how 100 of the most valuable brands engaged in 11 different online social media channels {i.e., blogs, Facebook, Twitter, wikis, and discussion forums }.
Engagement was measured by, both, the breadth and depth of  involvement.  Content and interaction, i.e., response to blog comments.  Each brand was give a numerical score.

The top 10 ENGAGEMENTdb brands with their scores are:

1.Starbucks (127)
2.Dell (123)
3.eBay (115)
4.Google (105)
5.Microsoft (103)
6.Thomson Reuters (101)
7.Nike (100)
8.Amazon (88)
9.SAP (86)
10.Tie - Yahoo!/Intel (85)
    ** Scores for overall brand engagement ranged from a high of 127 to a low of 1.

What researchers concluded was that ,clearly,  engagement directly correlates to financial performance.
The companies with the greatest breadth and depth- the top preformers  "on average grew 18% in revenues over the last 12 months, compared to the least engaged companies who on average saw a decline of 6% in revenue during the same period. The same holds true for two other financial metrics, gross margin and net profit".

The study also examined the best practices of four companies:: Starbucks, Dell, SAP, and Toyota.  These four key traits were discovered: {1} Emphasize quality, not just quantity, {2} scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job, {3} doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something, and {4} find your sweet spot.


Read  the nineteen page report or visit the main site.  Take the survey to find out  where your company ranks in the area of engagement across the social media channels.  Get real interactive with the site feature that affords you the the ability to see the rankings in different ways, from highest to lowest scores, alphabetical, etc.