How Social Are Your Customers?
You need the right information about your customers' social media habits. Here's how you can find out where they spend their time online, where to get demographic data, and determine their levels of participation.
You need the right information about your customers' social media habits. Here's how you can find out where they spend their time online, where to get demographic data, and determine their levels of participation.
How social are your customers, really? In our industry it seems this question is asked and answered a lot, but clients still have a hard time understanding exactly how social their customers are.
Their confusion usually stems from lack of knowledge on where customers are concentrated so they can effectively target their efforts, a possible disconnect with demographic data, not knowing how much customers participate, and not knowing where to get the right information about their customers. Let’s examine each of these areas, and try to effectively figure out just how social your customers really are.
Where Are Your Customers?
The most important factor when developing a social media marketing strategy is figuring out where your customers are. Follow them, and be there to engage with them wherever that may be.
So let’s figure it out where they are. Here are a few ways to accomplish this task:
This may seem like a long laundry list of places to go for information to figure out where your customers are, but as with anything: nothing easy is worthwhile. You really need to dive into the minds of your customers, the offerings of each social networking site, and data contained therein. The information will help you take the first step of figuring out how social your customers are.
Do Your Customers Participate?
There are a few ways to determine if your customers actively participate in social media:
At this point you should have a good idea how social your customers are. For some industries, you may discover that your customers don’t actively participate on social networking sites. That’s not to say that you should just bow out now, however. Monitoring trends and making sure you know when your customers go social is also important.
Following experts in the industry, looking at research and marketing studies, and continually evaluating your customer demographic data are always good ideas, and will keep you up to date on all your social media marketing efforts.
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