1. Identify your target audience from social media
It is critical for you to define the ideal target audience that can better help you determine the potential customers who will be interested in your offerings if they come across your social channels. As you start to generate sales, you will be able to better understand your target audience from the customer database you collect, however, if you just started your business you might not have any customer database that you can leverage on. Performing market research on your direct competitors and observing their social media content and marketing strategy is an alternative you can consider to outline your target audience.
You have to keep in mind that although you can sell to everyone, it does not imply that they are a complete match with your social media audience and that your brand will be able to target all of them with your social content. Therefore doing audience research is crucial, narrowing your focus while expanding your reach to better craft relevant content and ads, drive more traffic as well as reach successful sales conversion. Once you manage to identify your target audience, you should identify their demographic (age, location, occupation, etc) and dive in deeper into your audience's psychographics (interest, behavior, etc):
- Identify the social media channels and usage frequency of your audience.
- The ad format they are most likely to engage with: demos, videos, stories, GIFs, etc.
- The ideal proportion of content mix they would most likely be interested in: 80/20 rule, social media rules of thirds, informative, educational, entertainment, etc.
- Explore the digital marketing activities of other competitors, businesses, tv shows, news, etc, that your audience interacts with on social media.
- Conducting qualitative research like customer interviews and surveys is critical in this stage. It helps optimize offerings needs, understand how your social media fits into customers' buying journey (to address their pain points, for direct shopping, for product comparison), etc.
- Leverage existing customer databases if available, such as analyzing their purchasing pattern (amount spent on site, purchase frequency, etc) to better define targeting plans and approaches.
- Make great use of some of the most powerful tools available: Facebook's audience insight, Google's public market research tools and many more to analyze customer insights, demographics which includes age, gender, behavior, language and many more to sharpen consumer insights. Take a look at this article to learn about a variety of tools to decode your audience.
Once you obtain a great extent of understanding on your audience, you can craft appropriate content that your audiences would most likely be attracted to and choose the right channel to reach them. However, success in social media takes time, A/B testing and constant monitoring of your social media performance metric helps in optimizing what best represents your business goal and message.
2. Leverage on existing creatives
You don't have to always recreate new contents from scratch to promote your business. It's time for you to get out of the original content creation rut and try leveraging existing materials to different formats. The process of creating valuable and engaging content often takes an abundance of effort and resources. Knowing that shortening the time it takes to get high quality content out to customers is vital in today's environment, recycling content and assets can help maximize the value of your content efforts and keep content creation cost and time at minimum.
- Trim or edit full-length advertisement videos or other visual contents into shorter clips, sneak peeks, teasers, etc. By doing so you would be able to customize the content and repurposing it to fit a variety of social media platforms and also, reach a broader audience. For instance, small nuggets of visual content can serve as teasers that entices your audience to go watch the full version. Discover a variety types of videos and tips here.
- Refresh and republish old blog posts with up-to-date statistics, visuals, etc and remove the outdated information. You can also add the URL of this old piece of content to your new piece or embed it into a newsletter to continuously drive traffic and shares. Use these existing contents for SEO.
- Reformat and repackage pieces of content into another format, such as reformatting blog posts into ebooks, videos, helpful infographics, GIFs, email, etc. Take a look at these free and paid tools to help you scale your content creation quickly and repurpose great content into quality blog posts.
Ultimately, you can easily breathe new life into the assets you already have and supercharge your content marketing efforts by leveraging on the existing materials with a variety of content options that correlates to your business goals.
Think about what kind of Facebook fans pages that your target audience would like, what kind of life events they are experiencing, what relationship status they are, or if there is any anniversary date coming to them. That would help you a lot to reach them with a lower budget.
On top of this, an effective retargeting audience setting is even more important. There is no need to spend money on retargeting ads for people who will not be triggered by them. If someone has already purchased a product from your online store, then the chance of them wanting to buy the same product in the next few days is nihil. [Learn more about Retargeting audience setting method](https://goo.gl/uukssz).
3. How to coupon effectively
Coupon is one of the most commonly used in marketing mixes to build customer files and increase your conversion rates temporarily. However, it is not always the priority option for your business. Discounts and giveaway coupons might create adverse effects where it squeezes your profit margin unnecessarily, lessen the perceived value of your product or service, and create a sense of expectation for future discounting. Therefore, it is crucial to plan your coupon strategy well and budget accordingly to prevent unsustainable strategies that many businesses can't afford and deliver a far superior experience for your customers.
- Coupons are used as an incentive to purchase, however your business should also emphasize on its ability to increase average basket size and boost up sales. Aside from associating a minimum purchase or setting a certain set of product requirements to the coupon, you can also consider offering discount or giveaway coupons for bundled products or partner up with other brands to provide customers with attractive offerings. This upselling and cross selling opportunity can encourage customers to order more stock or even help you move clearance item stocks.
- Sending out deals at the right time can greatly increase your conversion rates. For instance, you observe that there is a significant increase in sales at the end of the month because of pay day, so you should schedule your discount and offers at around that period of time. Also, keeping track of the products that they bought and looked for could help you more accurately promote. For example, a customer who just bought his three month old son some clothes might need a certain product in the next six months.
- Leverage FOMO(Fear Of Missing Out) marketing is a tactic used to capture the attention of customers. The sense of urgency created from the demand level of your products can make customers show some level of interest to take action in making a purchase. Furthermore, making exclusive offers to certain groups of customers instead of site-wide coupons can make your customers feel special, build a positive impression towards your brand and make purchase decisions more convincing. This could help attract new, loyal customers without diminishing your overall brand and give you more control over your margin and growth of your core customer base.
- Some other methods to offer deals without giving away or hurting your brand too much is by offering customers add-on values.You can provide a seamless customer service, product usage guide, and some other services that your competitors do not offer and establish competitive advantages by creating additional benefits to your customers. Moreover, you can also implement psychological pricing customers can buy a pair of jeans for $50 and getting an additional pair will cost $35.
Ako Retargeting Funnel
There are various methods and possibilities for people to come across your brand, Ako created a funnel to help your business design retargeting journey like a breeze. Firstly, engagers refer to the audiences who are exposed with your business’ promoted or organic Facebook posts. These audiences are identified as prospects if they show interest or engage with the Facebook activities made by your business, for instance: liking the post or visiting your fan page. Once a certain degree/extent of brand image/knowledge is established, these prospects will most certainly be converted to website visitors where they will click into your Shopify store if they want to learn more about your products. These visitors will perform the action of browsing through the product page and adding the product to the cart if they show great interest in your product. Lastly, you would want to narrow your creatives to products and abandoned carts, focusing on delivering and reminding customers to convert purchase with dynamic product ads.
Different retargeting campaigns and messaging are used to re-engage with audiences at different levels of the conversion funnel. This is where Ako Retargeting comes into play and helps your business set up your campaign according to the targeting strategies, daily budget and different ad contents and formats. Let’s take a look at how the brand, Ako-Beauty, setup your 14 days retargeting campaign in just 15 minutes!
- Engagers/ Prospect Targeting:
- Website Visitors Retargeting:
- Dynamic Product Retargeting:
