By Strategez for business (@strategez4u)

How to target your market using social media

Why is it that some people approach social media like a bull at a gate. Push this product – push that product – push push push! Using social media to only push products disengages your audience. Is this happening to you?

How about your own posts on social media, are they working for you? If not, perhaps you don’t have a social media strategy.

Bring back the social in social media!If you attended a networking event would you go up to someone you never met before and say to them “Good to meet you. By the way here’s my business card. Go to my website, I have just the product or service you need!” Seriously, would you?

If you were a travel agent and you attended a birthday party, would you go up to a complete stranger and say “I’m a travel agent and have a fantastic holiday package for you rock climbing in the Andes!” Seriously would you?

Even more seriously, would these people take you seriously? Chances are they would look to run away from you and couldn’t do it fast enough. Yet this is exactly what I see happening on social media platforms, people constantly pushing their products and services in the ‘hope’ of selling something or generating a lead.

Bring back the social in social media. Why? Because people couldn’t care less about you and what you sell. They will only care, when they know, how much you care about them. Social media can be a very effective tool as part of an overarching marketing strategy. But first things first. Here’s a very important question for you.

What are you trying to achieve on social media?

Are you looking to gain more followers, generate leads, build your brand, spread a powerful message, stimulate discussion, raise capital or seed money, promote your products or services? As the late Stephen Covey says, “Start with the end in mind.” Before embarking on a social media campaign, you need to know what you want to achieve.

Understand your social media goals and objectivesIf you were to set off on a journey across Australia or the USA from coast to coast, chances are you would need a road map or GPS to guide you along the way. You know where you will start your journey and you know where you want to end up. Without a road map or GPS you could end up anywhere or worse still, go around and around in circles and end up where you started. Social media is no different, you must know where your starting point is, where you want to go and what you want to achieve along the way. In other words, you need a social media strategy or social media GPS.

Define your social media objectives. What do you want to achieve through your social media efforts?
For example;

• Do you want to create awareness of your brand and build brand equity?
• Do you want to drive people to your website?
• Do you want to build trust and customer loyalty?
• Do you want to build a following and subscriber list?
• Are you looking to promote your products and services?
• Are you looking to increase your sales?
• Do you want to generate new leads?

These are only a few of the possible goals and objectives of a social media strategy and these are not mutually exclusive in terms of your marketing goals and objectives.
The point is, you need to plug in the end objective into your social media GPS.

Create SMARTER Goals. As with any marketing activity, your social media objectives need to be SMART or better still - SMARTER.  Specific, Measureable, Agreed, Realistic, Time-Bound, Ethical and Recorded. For example, if you are looking to build a subscriber list, you might create a SMARTER goal where you want 2,000 subscribing to your blog over the next six months by providing value added posts providing information that helps them grow their sales.


Target the right demographics
A successful social media strategy is where you align your social media objective to the right people with the right message using the right social media platform. If your target audience is ‘business to business’ and you are selling process improvement technology, you would not be targeting the 16- to 21-year-old age group delivering messages about business software. However, if you were selling a mobile phone app suitable for this age group, then of course social media would make sense. Therefore, before creating your strategy and defining your objectives, you need to really understand who your target market is and what you are looking to achieve.


Who is your target market?
If your objective is to use social media to grow your business, then you must know exactly who your target market is. Depending on the business you are in, you may have more than one target market contingent on your social media objectives. For instance, purely increasing your followers is completely different from building a subscriber list or sending potential buyers to your website.

What age are your target market? Where do they live? What social media platforms are they likely to hang out on? What are their likes or dislikes? What kind of posts do they respond to the best? Are they likely to engage with you, like or share your posts? Why would they be interested in your products or services and what’s in it for them? In other words, how will they benefit from using your products and services?
An easy way to identify your target market, is to create what is known as a buyer persona aligned to your social media objectives.


Create a buyer persona for each of your target markets
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. Buyer personas help you identify and refine the right audience so that you can create the right messages, at the right time using the right social media platform.

Your followers might be in the 18 – 25-year old age bracket whereas your subscriber list of potential buyers may be an older demographic, say in the 35 – 50-year old age bracket. If you are looking to create brand awareness or sell your products and service, your perfect buyer persona might be business people. If you have more than one objective, you will need to create a different persona for each target market and define your social media objectives.

Your buyer persona is a fictional character and not a real one you give a name to like ‘Cautious Colin’ or ‘Knowing Nola.’ Creating a buyer persona will identify the following:

• Age bracket
• Gender
• Occupation
• Income bracket
• Interests
• Habits
• Likes and dislikes
• Motivations and objections
• Problems and opportunities
• Fears
• Preferred social media communication channel

The more specific you are in creating your buyer personas, the more likely you will achieve your social media objectives.


Choose your social media channelBecause not all social media channels work for each target market (buyer persona) and the messages you wish to convey, choose the right one for your message and target audience. If your target market is business to business, you might look at LinkedIn as a communication channel. If your target market is the younger generation, you might look at Instagram or Facebook. You might create blog or twitter account depending on your social media goals and objectives. You may have to use multiple channels to reach a different audience, one for each of your buyer personas matched to your social media objectives.


Create engaging contentOnce you have matched the right social media channel for each of your objectives, it’s time to create your content. As mentioned above, your content cannot be push push push your products or services all the time. If you do, there is no quicker way for people to disengage. Social media is called social media for a reason, it is to engage your audience with something of value using a social medium. Think about how you can deliver value, content others will want to read and share. It’s about engaging your audience with new and fresh content to keep their attention and keep them coming back to you.

A general rule of thumb is, for every ‘sales’ or push message, you should have five to nine other messages that are of interest to your target audience that adds value. Consider how you will deliver your content. Will you use video, infographics, photos or just text? Using a mix of mediums to deliver your content will keep your audience more engaged. Statistically people are far more likely to become engaged or read your message when accompanied by something visual such as a photo or video.


Post frequently
Social media is a long term strategy and can be very time consuming. If you don’t have the time or the resources to support your strategy, it may not work for you. Imagine you post an advertisement in a daily newspaper, once. After a day, the newspaper is likely to end up in the paper waste as not everyone will even take notice of your advert. You can’t expect that a month later, that single newspaper advert will still relevant because it won't be due to lack of frequency. It's the same with social media, if you post once a month, you are unlikely to gain any traction. The same with radio, without frequency not everyone will hear your message unless you are advertising a one day special with a strong call to action. In order for any promotional campaign to work, especially social media, you need to consider frequency. If you use twitter for instance, you have about 10-30 seconds to capture someone’s attention so you need frequency to build a following. Depending on the research, all of us are exposed to over 3,000 marketing messages a day so frequency helps cut through the clutter.


Growing your business
In any relationship, you have to build trust and rapport before people will buy into your social media messages especially if you are looking to grow your sales and customer base. Often when I’ve connected with someone on LinkedIn or Twitter I receive messages like this:

• Thanks for connecting if you are interested in ……. please send me a message.
• Thanks for connecting check out my (blog, profile) here
• Thanks for connecting. My company provides……

Delete – delete -delete!

When you receive messages like this you don't have a reason to engage. Your audience will not engage with you if all you do is push product and ask them to buy something. Try building a relationship first with frequent value added messages instead. Once you have built trust and engagement, your audience is more likely to receive your marketing and promotional messages with greater interest.
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Remember, social media should be part of an overarching marketing strategy, not the only strategy.

For more information regarding social media, leadership, sales training and more visit www.strategez.com

By Colm Baker, Social Media Marketing (@whabangtweets)

Finally the moment was upon us. The stage was set for the highly anticipated appearance of Gary Vaynerchuk. There was a sense of agitation from the crowd in The Mansion House. The audience of business leaders and entrepreneurs waited impatiently like giddy children would for presents on Christmas morning. I was one of them. And why such excitement surrounding the speech of a 40 year old Belarusian emigrant?

Gary Vee is no ordinary public speaker or entrepreneur. He is a certified serial business builder. Throughout his life he has built businesses into major successes from his lemonade stand franchise, to his online wine store, to his digital agency Vayner Media. He has become a prolific angel investor and venture capitalist with a particular flare for noticing where consumer attention will migrate to. Early investments in Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr showed that Vaynerchuk had his finger on the pulse of consumer attention. For some time now he has been preaching across multiple social platforms and to anybody that will listen that the attention is now well and truly on Snapchat. But on Monday the 21st March 2016, the attention of everybody in The Mansion House in Dublin, was on the man himself Gary Vaynerchuk.



GaryVee talked about Snapchat gaining consumer attention but on Monday 21st March 2016 the attention of over 600 people in the Mansion House in Dublin was firmly fixed on the exuberant entrepreneur.

1. Snapchat gives businesses under-priced attentionAfter recounting his own personal success story Gary excitedly proposed that one of the main contributing factors to his success has been an innate ability to sense where consumer attention will be and to use the tools in these spaces to sell shit, as he puts it. When he spots an opening, or a possible trend, he doesn’t wait to see how people will approach this medium, how others will react or how to do it right.  He reacts ferociously quickly, works tirelessly to equip himself with the technical ability to bring his own storytelling and sales skills to these new tools, and goes all in. In 1997, after being shown email he immediately realized this could be used as a tool to sell products, in this case wine. Gary was an early adopter of AdWords and other Pay Per Click type strategies and owned the term “wine” for next to nothing at the dawn of online advertising. These strategies allowed him to build a business, Wine Library, from $3M to $60M, at a time when many experts were more than skeptical about the potential of eCommerce.

Self-awareness and emotional intelligence are two characteristics that Gary believes he has in abundance. This piercing self-awareness led Gary to the realization that he had an innate skill at perceiving where consumer attention would migrate to. In typical fashion, he went all in, and decided to put more weight behind his gut instinct and began his now illustrious career as an investor. He correctly predicted that the attention would now move to social media and hedged his bets with investments in Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. Aside from the significant financial success of these investments, his biggest investment in social media was in the creation of Vayner Media, his much talked of digital marketing agency. Gary knew social media was not just a fad that he could make a quick buck off through investing in social networks but rather it would become the most important advertising platform of the future. So he positioned Vayner Media as a social sales shop that he has now built into a colossal digital agency.


Gary implored the crowd to move to
“where the attention actually is!”

and not to focus on where there is
“high potential attention”


To illustrate his point Gary stated that his attention is firmly fixed Snapchat despite having 1.2million followers on Twitter. By no means is his Twitter account redundant, but his most creative engagements are on Snapchat because that’s where consumer attention now is.

He insists that businesses are wasting money on outdoor advertising and TV adverts because nobody is paying attention to them. Gary urged the business leaders and marketers in the room not to be fooled by the vanity figures of TV advertising which still shows engaged audiences during live sports events because as soon as the commercials come on people reach for their smartphone to talk about the sports event on social media. The problem he suggests is that previously if you were watching an event on the home you had no alternative but to watch the commercials during the highly engaging sports event. Whereas now we can continue our engagement with the sports event with friends or celebrities through social media. Marketers make the mistake of thinking that peoples attention is on the TV. It’s not. The attention is on the event. And while the TV commercials show a powerful Jeep cruising through beautiful mountainous landscape the consumer’s attention is still on the event but the channel has changed. The channel has now switched to social media and businesses sequestering their budgets into expensive TV commercials are missing out. He seemed frustrated and dejected as he mused that these expert marketers can continue to console themselves with vanity viewing figures but their efforts are futile. You couldn’t help but imagine the rambunctious Vaynerchuk ranting at high level executives of multinational companies who refuse to leave traditional methods behind and go all in on social media as Gary has done. Gary painted a similar picture for the fate of outdoor advertising. He suggested that, like other channels, outdoor advertising was once effective but nobody is paying attention anymore. Why? Gary believes that the smartphone has led to the

“biggest shift in consumer behaviour in a generation”

Gary described how that even when people are driving, and fully aware of the associated risks, their heads are buried in their smartphone whenever they have a second to spare. His hypothesis was verified by the nervous chuckles emanating from the crowd suggesting that many were guilty of this offence. He proclaimed that

“the mobile phone is the most important product in the world”

Everybody has one and it is never more than arms length from them. He demanded a show of hands to see how many people sleep within an arms length of their mobile phone. Arms soared into the air, reminiscent of a Mexican wave at a soccer match. The message was simple. The attention is on mobile and social media. It is clear in GaryVee’s mind that all marketing efforts should be focused on these two mediums.
Gary delved even deeper revealing that while you need to focus on where the attention is the really significant successes emerge from

“finding where the under-priced attention is.”

Gary is convinced that the attention is now moving or has moved to Snapchat and he has again been one of the first movers. As the #AskGaryVee book tour continues to steam through cities across the world, his incredibly captivating, expletive filled protestations about the benefits of Snapchat has in itself led to an incredible surge in the number of social media marketers (including myself) spreading the message. He believes that Snapchat’s growth has been delayed because many of us suffer from a lack of authenticity when forming opinions. We get caught up in the noise of the internet and take the clickbait views of headlines to be the truth rather than forming our own opinions. Since it’s launch Snapchat has had many detractors and many “marketing gurus” have advised against using Snapchat for businesses, stating that you cannot sell with Snapchat. Gary rubbishes this view and talked about how Snapchat can be used to give personality to your brand and really connect with consumers. But also announced

“I think Snapchat is an incredible place to sell” 

He pleaded with the packed crowd at The Mansion House in Dublin to become practitioners of Snapchat and to

“stop headline reading. Use it, do it and become it”

Not only is Snapchat where the attention currently lies but more importantly it is also where the under-priced attention is. Snapchat has engagement rates as high as 80% compared to less than 1% for Facebook. Snapchat has over 100million active daily users whereas Facebook would rather talk about active monthly users. Snapchat’s stories feed is based on chronological order, there is no newsfeed algorithm to limit your reach. It is based chronologically rather than some perceived affinity you may have for the specified content. Snapchat has not been saturated by advertising…yet! As GaryVee proclaimed

“Marketers will ruin it, the way we ruin everything.”

His message was clear. Attention outweighs metrics. Mobile and social media is where consumer attention is. Snapchat is where there is real value and under-priced attention. Snapchat is where businesses should be placing their attention.


2. Capitalize on your strengthsThe most profound aspect of the #AskGaryVee book cover is the significance Gary gives to self-awareness. As you can see below, 22 other topics are listed but only leadership and social media are afforded the same importance as self-awareness.

Self-Awareness is something Gary Vaynerchuk places a great deal of importance on. Get his book now to see why.

Gary’s followers will be aware that for some time now Gary has been dissing on what he calls “fake entrepreneurs”. Of course, this term has grabbed the attention, the headlines and it has also caused a degree of consternation within the startup and entrepreneur culture that has become ubiquitous since the success of The Social Network. As Gary jokes

“everybody in America has a friend whose kid is hoping to be the next Zuckerberg” 
and,
“anyone with some money is throwing $25k at hoping that their friend’s kid’s idea will become the next Facebook.”

Don’t get it twisted though. Gary is not ragging on entrepreneurs. He is one. However, what he is doing is trying to do is start a much bigger conversation. With the headline grabbing term “fake entrepreneurs” he is trying to switch the attention away from the get rich quick and anyone can start a business mentality to one where people assess their characteristics and play to their strengths rather than try to fit in with the popular trend of entrepreneurship. He tells the crowd

“understand who you are, be self-aware.”

Gary believes that the problem has surfaced because the internet and the smartphone
“has made it easier than ever before to become an entrepreneur.”

Holding aloft his smartphone he proclaimed that within this little device you have the same power that major corporations like CNN had only a few years ago. He reaffirms his belief that it is easier than ever for people to become entrepreneurs before pausing to pose the question are you able? Gary suggests that there is nothing wrong with being a #2, #3, #4 #5 #6 or even #67 in a company challenging the crowd to consider

“how many of these people at Facebook are millionaires?”

He mused about the loss of many great potential #2’s emerging from institutions such as MIT who now think it’s their right to own a business or create the next killer app. Gary seemed bemused at the naivety of today’s graduates stressing that very few apps, businesses or people actually make it as #1 in the tech world. With a sense of frustration he again emphasized that some people are not cut out for entrepreneurship and to stop falling into the populist norm exclaiming

“BE YOURSELF, DO YOU”

He urged the crowd to audit themselves, reassess their strengths and weaknesses, then focus all their energy on playing to their strengths and maximizing their ability in this area. Gary encouraged the crowd to stop stressing about their weaknesses, other people’s strengths, and what others are doing well and concentrate on what you can do best. Once you become honest with yourself and gain an understanding of your true strengths this is when you can add massive value to your audience. And that is what it’s all about according to Gary. Adding value. Don’t forget his mantra:
“Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.”



Gary Vee encouraged the crowd at the Mansion House to audit themselves, find their strengths and maximize them.

3. The market is the only judge in townAnybody who has watched Gary’s interviews or keynotes will know that his most vociferous outbursts often come in response to suggestions, assumptions or questions from people forgetting that the market is the only true judge of the value of a business idea, product or service. To this effect, one of his most commonly used mantra’s is “The Market is the Market, is the Market, is the Market!”Suggesting that no matter what you think about your business idea, product or service, ultimately the only opinion that matters is that of the market. As discussed above he is often at loggerheads with top executives who do not want to abandon traditional forms of advertising such as outdoor billboards and TV commercials. Gary suggests they are making a crucial mistake by not listening to him, but more importantly, not listening to the market. As he peered into the crowd, surveying the engrossed audience, he vehemently announced

“You are no judge of your idea, the market is….You don’t get to decide if your idea is a success, the market does.”

An interesting way Gary monitors the market is by analyzing the charts of the App store. He urged the crowd to assess the charts every morning, see what’s performing well, see what’s making a move up the charts and analyze the trends. The reaction of the crowd, dumbfounded by the brilliant simplicity of this method, was to suggest one of those “why didn’t I think of that” moments. With a tone of astonishment at the crowd’s naivety, Gary went on to state the reason this works is because the App store is the best store, on the best and most important device in the world.

During the Q&A session, many of the questions posed could have easily been rebuffed by the market mantra and although Gary was at a pains to emphasize this he did offer a huge amount of value to those entrepreneurs lucky enough to get his advice. A six generation whiskey distiller asked how to market their new product launch. Gary suggested they analyze the market, find out what soft drink is the bestseller at the moment and see does it mix well with that. Then you promote your product through the success of the other product. An executive from the national broadcaster, RTE, asked something to the effect of how they can overcome the downturn in TV advertising and surge of streaming services. Gary suggested that they should provide more original content to add value to the proposition. Little did Gary know that RTE had major success with their biggest investment in content for some time with crime drama Love/Hate. The market loved it, it was trending every week, you couldn’t avoid talking about the show, and the new season is highly anticipated. However, had Gary known this it probably would have drawn the response “the market is the market, is the market”. Focus on this rather than disrupting the viewer with 1 minute and 50 second long adverts before I attempt to watch a programme on the online RTE Player. Add value, listen and adapt. A young entrepreneur involved in Severe MMA, a niche website dedicated to MMA, was clearly frustrated and angry with the way larger sites were reproducing his original content to make multiple clickbait type articles. He passionately described the sacrifices he has made to provide real valuable, engaging and original content but didn’t reap the rewards because sites with much broader focus and higher engagement repurpose their content and steal the traffic. However, he did not get any sympathy or pity from Gary who responded sharply with that same mantra “the market is the market, is the market, is the market”. Gary went on to provide some advice but the message was clear to everybody in the room. Being an entrepreneur is tough, you have no divine right to be a success, the market will determine whether you are or not.

Much to the exasperation of Vaynerchuk and some of the Mansion House crowd similar questions kept arising. Although often phrased differently the same principle was at the core of his response. Respect the market’s view. To one very young entrepreneur asking how she should protect her idea so others can’t do it better Gary responded sharply that she can’t. To the shock of some of the audience he quickly added that if someone does it better they deserve to win and that’s tough luck for this young entrepreneur. The young entrepreneur possibly hoping for some affirmation or sympathy was clearly taken aback by the disheartening rebuffal she received. This was not some beacon of unfounded positivity we have become used to in The Social Network culture, this was real, practical, and genuine advice from a seasoned and genuine entrepreneur. And that my friends is why the attention is on GaryVee.


What do you think? Please feel free to share this blog if you thought it was interesting or know somebody who likes GaryVee. I would love to hear any feedback or discuss these topics further on Snapchat (whabang), Facebook, Twitter, comment below or email me colm@whabang.ie.

What are your thoughts on Snapchat? How should businesses be using it?

Are too many people leaving behind potentially stellar corporate careers in the search of misguided entrepreneurial dreams? Why are you an entrepreneur?

What does the market is the market, is the market, is the market mean for you?
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I definitely recommend you check out @GaryVee on Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter. Or check him out on Facebook or Youtube.

By Mike Scott, Business Consultant, Sales Coach, Writer (@mikescottnow)

I wanted to follow up from one of my last posts “Twitter is NOT Dead…How I Generated Over $30,000 in 3 Months with Twitter” and go more in-depth about how I how I was able to generate the leads that turned into new clients.

Twitter has proven to be a great resource among social media platforms for generating leads but I still get questions often about how it’s done.

So here is the secret sauce, below are the 3 top ways that I generate leads for my personal consulting business @mikescottnow and my new digital marketing agency @storytellermco


Gratitude

Yes, I know you’re probably thinking how is gratitude a secret to generating leads on Twitter. Well, I would have to say out of all 3 tips we will review this is the number one way I have generated so many leads from Twitter. The fact is most people get socially disconnected when using social media. Too often people don’t see the person on the other end of the tweets and treat them as just someone online instead of with compassion and how you would treat someone in person.

Take your time, interact, engage and you will be amazed by how many people will reach out to you for your advice just because you said thank you.

• When someone retweets native content, thank him or her for doing so. In person when someone opens a door for you…do you say thank you? It’s the same principal and like I have said before they took their time whether it’s seconds or not its still matters.
• If someone retweets your content, take the time to review their feed and return the favor if they have something you find interesting. The key here is not just retweeting because they retweeted but actual finding something that you find interesting and that your audience will as well.

​Twitter Advanced Search

Are you using this FREE feature from Twitter?

It’s crazy because the majority of people I speak with have no idea what the Twitter Advanced Search is or does. Ok so imagine you can you had a database of 305 million monthly active users that you could see what they are talking about, what their needs are or what the want to eat for breakfast in Sacrament, CA.

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Doesn’t that sound like something that would be good to be true or would cost an astronomical amount of money to use?


Ok so now what if I told you that Twitter has something called Twitter Advanced Search and you can do everything I said above and so much more for FREE…well there is, all you have to do is go to the Twitter Advanced Search and you can target keywords, exact phrases, hashtags, specific people, people that follower certain accounts, locations, dates of tweets and more…enjoy!


Blogging

If you are not blogging consistently and tweeting your blog posts then please stop reading NOW so you can write a blog post and tweet it…I’ll wait…seriously…don’t keep reading until you do so…are you still reading…stop…Ok hopefully your back now and have done what I asked you.


I was definitely serious about writing the blog post and tweeting it right then because this is one of the biggest ways I have found to drive not only traffic to my website or blog but also leads to my email list.
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Just to give you an idea in the last 7 days from writing 2 new blog posts, repurposing one post, posting them to Twitter/Facebook and tweeting relevant information I was able to drive 758 Unique Visitors, 2,880 Page Views, 39 New Email Subscribers, 4 quality leads and 2 new clients to our new digital agency website www.storytellermco.com


So does blogging work…YES! If you haven’t started yet, just get started it doesn’t need to be great work but you need to start putting out content around what your expertise is and if you already know this to be true then keep going!
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These 3 tips are really the tip of the iceberg for generating leads from Twitter. Just remember, put out quality content that your audience wants to see, be grateful that you actually have an audience that follows you, put in the work and you to will start generating leads using Twitter.
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If I can ever be of any help, please do not hesitate to reach out!

Mike Scott @mikescottnow