It’s that time again and in this weeks T-Time With Tillison Mark is looking at how to connect with your target audience on social media as well as advertising to this audience.
In this T-Time Show:
- Twitter Analytics – How this can help you to identify opportunities to connect better with your target audience
- Example – Using Tomorrowland festival to demonstrate how you can target a relevant audience
- Connecting with the Audience on Social Media – Tools and strategy you can use to engage this audience
- Advertising to this Audience – How to target ads to this audience once you have found them
Twitter Analytics
(00:30) Browsing popular events on Twitter is something which Mark has newly discovered. Embedded within Twitter Analytics, at the the top of the menu bar is an events tab. Here you’ll receive an overview of top events being talked about on Twitter. This isn’t an extensive list and currently appears to still be under development but it’ll likely grow and become more comprehensive overtime. In its current standing it is however a great tool at gauging your target audiences interests and likes as well as finding ways to connect with them.
Despite currently being a little US focused, this tool is wonderful way to obtain a breakdown of events and trends which are closely aligned to your target audience. Another particularly beneficial feature is to see users demographics and platform usage – all useful when creating a marketing strategy or campaign.
Tomorrowland
(01:33) An example, Mark looks at the Belgian music festival Tomorrowland. From this screen you can see what’s being discussed around this event, as well as figures such as number of tweets, reach and impressions. The value of this data from Twitter Analytics shouldn’t be ignored. Having the right data paired with the right strategy is a sure way to a successful campaign.
You’ll also see a list on the right of the screen detailing top tweets as well as live tweets. This will give you a great understanding of the types of conversations taking place and who are the big influences within this event. You can also see a view of the conversational split based on country, which is fantastic at knowing who and where to focus your marketing efforts on.
This will likely become useful beyond just the big international events. As Twitter develops and grows this tool further you’ll probably see more localised and smaller events appear. These may be more closely related to your business or your goals. However even when using big events like this, finding out where your target audience may “hang out” or how they engage, can help you to develop more refined content. If you then started engaging with the conversations taking place, this will help you to build brand awareness amongst your audience.
You don’t need to stop there when it comes to finding conversations and events to talk about. Getting involved with public holidays/awareness days celebrated in your country or region is a great way to generate new and fresh content. Although most of these will be relatively short due to their popularity, occasions such as this will make a great addition to any marketing calendar.
How to Connect with your Target Audience on Social Media
So you’ve had a look around Twitter Analytics and you’ve found the right event where you’ll like to focus your engagement around. The next step is to create an appealing content plan. This content will ideally need to be focused on topics and conversations which are popular amongst the community involved in this event. While they are also your target audience you don’t really want this content to be focused on selling you just yet. They will likely have never heard of you, but they are interested in Tomorrowland for example. Your way into building brand awareness is to generate content about what they want to find or see. But how do you know what they want?
(03:38) By simply running a search on Google for Tomorrowland you can see what people are also asking. This is Google’s way of helping a user find an answer to a question they may have. For you, it’s a way of finding out what users are typically searching for and need/want to know. This likely means there is an opportunity to create a piece of content in which you will provide an answer to these searches. If you can be seen by your target audience as not only a brand which is relevant (by engaging in their interest) but also a brand who can provide good quality and useful content they will start to build positive associations with your company. By having a positive association with you, they are going to be more engaged with you and more likely to interact; making retargeting them down the line just that little bit more effective.
(04:36) A really wonderful tool you may not be aware of which goes hand in hand with this event tool on Twitter is Hashtagify. By searching for the hashtag of your event, in this case we looked at #Tomorrowland, you’ll see a list of both the top tweets but also a snapshot of recent tweets. These will range from both the average user with a “normal” following to companies and influencers with the largest followings. You can make use of Hashtagify to build yourself a better content plan which you can then use to the target audience you share with this event. Making a note of frequent accounts you keep seeing would be useful too, as they are likely influencers within this community and almost certainly hold a following of your desired target audience.
How to Advertise to Your Target Audience
(05:52) When it comes to advertising to your target audience there are a number of ways to do this. Twitter will allow you to directly target the users of hashtag and followers of a certain twitter handle (so perhaps the event’s official account or an influencer). Facebook will offer you interest targeting where you can reach them via their interests. They all work fairly similarly and your main goal is to promote your content to the audience on these platforms so you can build a remarketing audience.
This is where having the quality and relevant content comes in useful. What you’re doing is putting your brand out there within this target audience in a positive way by offering them something they are looking for and are interested in. By building the brand awareness like this you’re also, little by little, expanding your remarketing audience for future campaigns.
Using Google Ads
(07:53) Another useful way to target your ideal audience is through Google Ads. You can use Google Ads to build Custom Affinity and Custom Intent Audiences around this event. This will allow you to target users visiting certain web pages, or searching for related keywords. In this case it’ll be looking for searches related to Tomorrowland. This will even be effective at targeting users who are interacting with competing brands and content; allowing you to expand your reach to them too.
There are many more ways to to target your audience and we will be discussing them in future T-Time with Tillison videos. Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss out.
Let us know in the comments if there is anything else you know about connecting with your target audience. You can also get in touch to find out just how we can help you better with social media marketing.
