- Welcome back to our series
on "Successfully Launching Your Brand on Social Media."
Today, we're gonna discuss the best ways to develop a plan
for your social launch.
Before doing anything else,
it's important to have a solid strategy in place.
This will help guide and inspire you as you go.
(upbeat music)
Let's start by discussing the first step
of creating a strategy, "How to Find Your Audience?"
So your brand is live.
It is ready to go.
You have products and services
that you are ready to promote.
So how do you ensure that your message
reaches your target audience?
Before you do anything,
before you create anything
for your campaign or design any marketing assets,
we need to identify your target audience.
By identifying the pain points
of your target audience and like what they are experiencing,
you can talk directly to them
about how your products or services will help them.
We asked Morgan,
how does a business identify that target audience?
- You need to understand people's motivation
for buying your product first.
You need to answer a couple of questions.
Who are you serving exactly?
What problem are you solving for them?
So it's useful to survey people with some questions
in mind, for example, biographical information
such as gender, age, location, et cetera.
What they value, what they care about,
and what they don't.
Pain points, what do they struggle with?
This is important because it's about
what we can do to make it easier for them.
What their interests are,
where do they find their information?
Who do they trust?
And their blockers,
what are their main blockers
to purchasing your service or product?
Once you have these insights,
you collect them into a Persona Document
that represents your ideal client.
You can then target your social messaging
towards that person.
- So it is essential that you identify exactly
who your target market is,
so that you can target your messaging successfully.
By surveying members of your community,
you can start to develop data on the kinds
of people who would be interested
in your product or service.
All right, today, we're gonna set up a campaign
for a hypothetical company called, Home and Co,
they're a homeware and lifestyle business.
So their business model is to supply stylish
and affordable furniture and homewares
for people that might be on a budget.
So we asked Morgan, how do you find out more
about people interested in your product?
How would we reach out to them to interview them,
so that we can build the data that we need
to identify the perfect client for our business,
Home and Co.
- One of the easiest ways to get things started
is by engaging with your social community.
For example, you could ask them to take part in a survey
and in return, they get 20% off voucher for your business.
The survey will include questions to identify demographics,
as I mentioned earlier.
We should also include questions personal to your brand.
So you may add what social platforms do you use?
What is your favorite social media account?
Pain points when buying homewares?
Quality and price?
Are you looking for price over quality or vice versa?
You can also use social analytic tools
to gain insights into your community.
Every social platform has these,
but make sure you're on a business account,
so you can access it.
It will show you the demographics
and many other useful insights.
Once you have the interview and analytics data,
you examine it to find common and repeating themes.
You then collate the most common themes
into a fictional person called a Persona or a Client Avatar.
This persona represents your ideal client
and you may find you have more
than one type of ideal client, and that's okay.
That means you have more than one potential revenue stream,
but your marketing has to speak
to one of these personas at a time.
- Okay, so you find people to survey
through your socials or community.
So researching and creating personas
based on that research
can help you personalize your messaging
to the exact client you want to attract.
And then, you can look and really talk to their pain points.
If you didn't catch all that, (chuckles) it's okay.
To help you, we've created a Persona Workbook
that you can take home with you and remind you
of those pain points that we want to look at.
The workbook has some suggested interview questions
as well to get you started
and a persona template to fill in.
The workbook summarizes many of the points
from this workshop,
so you can reference them later.
So firstly, your initial action points are listed here.
First, you need to find someone to talk to
that represents your target audience,
and then think of questions to ask them.
And lastly, use that data that you collected
to fill out the persona template as well as you can.
If you need some pointers
on what interview questions to include, we have you covered.
We've provided some sample ones for our homeware company
that you can then take and adapt to your product.
You can see these are a mix of demographic data
and product-specific questions.
So ask questions that'll help you gather information
on these three goal insights,
who is your target customer?
Where is your target customer
and why will they use your specific services?
We've included a Persona template that you can see here,
that you can fill in
with all the information regarding your ideal client.
Now for Home and Co,
we have built one out right here
with our ideal client, Mira.
And so, we're gonna have a look at some of her information.
And most importantly,
we're gonna look at her goals and her frustration.
So her goals, "She wants to find affordable furniture
that's also stylish.
And she'd also like to gain some basic understanding
on design principles."
Her frustrations, "Going into a store
is just really time consuming.
She has limited information
and knowledge on design practices.
So she's finding it kind of overwhelming
and would really like some help looking
for a capsule collection."
So these are the pain points we want to tackle
with our homeware services.
So there are a couple more slides in the workbook
about this, and I'm gonna leave that for you for now,
but definitely look through it in your own time.
Okay. So now that we've worked
through your persona for this campaign,
how do you go about engaging with your audience?
A good way to start is by building awareness
around your campaign.
The goal of a campaign like this is to build an audience
and here's Morgan to explain how to do that.
- When designing a marketing campaign,
it's good to understand the Marketing Funnel.
This is the process of moving your audience through steps
to engaging with and ultimately, buying your product.
The funnel has three main stages, Awareness,
Consideration, and Conversion.
We're currently sitting right at the top
of the funnel in Awareness.
To build awareness,
we would lead with an engagement tactic designed
to get attention and draw your audience in.
Running a competition would be a strong choice
for an awareness campaign.
Is there a great way of getting your brand known
by providing a simple incentive to interact with this?
What's most important is to have a low barrier to entry,
keep it simple for people to enter,
ensuring it only takes a second of their time.
Example social media competitions could be,
"Tell us in five words or less why you love
our range of furnishings.
Why these would look great in your home?"
Or "Comment and Win" is another popular style
of competition.
This gives more reach.
Friends of friends will see the post organically
or share this competition post
on your stories for more entries.
Social platforms have great articles
on what type of competitions you can and can't host,
so make sure you check them out.
As people enter the competition,
you build your audience following.
- Morgan mentioned the Marketing Funnel
and this is what it looks like visually.
So you see that your awareness campaign sits right
at the top of the funnel.
And the idea is to move people
down to the bottom of the funnel
to where they're actually buying your product or service.
So your audience has different needs
at each stage in the funnel.
And right now, we're talking only about the needs relevant
to getting them into the funnel, raising awareness.
Okay, that wraps up episode two,
but we're just getting started.
You can find the link to that workbook
in the video description below.
Next episode, we'll be discussing how to choose
the right platform for your audience, so don't miss out.
Hit the subscribe button to make sure
you never miss an episode and always get notified.
See you next time.
(light upbeat music ends)