There’s no doubt that social media is changing online marketing, and small businesses, once reluctant, are warming up to how it can help them to grow and thrive in this recovering economy. They are also coming to understand that social media marketing is not as easy as just setting up an account and watching the customers stream in. While it’s great to have a goal and a strategy in mind before getting down to tactics as my friends at Media Two have written eloquently about, if you decide that entering the social media space is right for you, what do you do next?

What you do next is back off from describing what you want. Leading up to this point, it has been all about you, but when talking about social media, that ceases to be true. Now, it becomes about your audience. And before you can get there, you need to describe that person (you heard me correctly: person, not people) in great detail and know what that person wants from you. And what that person doesn’t.

In most marketing and analysis circles, this is called building personas. But that’s just a term. Don’t get hung up on it. It just means you need to figure out some things about the customer you are talking with online. (Also not a typo: with, not to.)

To get your brain kickstarted on this, I’ll give you a few questions you might ask about your customer that can help you figure out how you’re going to engage that person.

What does my customer…:

• do for a living?
• want?
• like?
• use?
• find interesting and exciting?
• do online?
• consider valuable?
• consider important?
• spend money on?
• dislike?

All in all, you need to understand something about your customer’s life. If you can’t imagine it and don’t know, you should get started finding out. It does help if you’ve actually met a customer. It also helps if you have a marketer behind you who can help expose those answers.

The benefits of doing this are 2-fold.

1. You can’t give your audience what they want unless you know what they want. You don’t have to get this perfect right away. There is always some experimenting to do. By focusing on what your audience wants, you can avoid the trap of trying to force your message onto customers. It’s then that you start giving to your audience, and that puts you in a place to be genuine, authentic, relevant, and interesting. That’s what gets you followers.
2. As I have stated quite a few times before, my background is in creative writing. One thing you learn right away is that effective writing is normally done with a specific person in mind. When I was a young writer, that person was my mother. This is a bad thing when your subject matter gets a bit risqué, but I couldn’t help myself. I imagined her reading it. My audience now is… a secret. But the point is that it’s easier to write and more comfortable if you are writing for someone you know. You can’t be out there to please everyone, but you can aim to please 1 person. Having this kind of focus really lets you find your voice, tone, topic, and more. Try writing to the world and then try writing to a specific person. The same subject. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

See? Big difference.

Don’t skip steps. Get a picture of your customer in mind and use that to create tactics and content that people can use. That’s where quality social media marketing begins.

Tags: audience, getting started, marketing, personas, small business, social media, writing | Category Marketing, Web & Tech