07/09/2021
Niche Research and Targeting it the Right Way
Many social media marketers first concern is to automatically want to know about traffic generation. Forget about niche research, forget about consumer intelligence, don't worry about setting up the right site to get in front of the right target audience eyeballs.
Let's just skip straight to the "good stuff." That's the kind of mindset that happens many time, and that's why a lot of people struggle in this game.
You have to understand that until and unless you find yourself barking up the right tree, you're just going to be chasing your tail. I know I'm using a lot of dog analogies, but these are the most appropriate. Most people are simply just chasing their tails and wasting a whole lot of time doing stuff that doesn't really add to their bottom line.
A lot of these, and I would guess all of them, can be quickly dispensed with if people only did niche targeting ahead of time. In other words, know your audience. Since you have a clear profile of who your target audience is, the next step is to go to these different social media platforms and find them there.
Believe it or not, whatever it is you are promoting, regardless of how esoteric, obscure or weird it may be, there are already people on social media platforms talking about or showing interest in whatever, you are promoting, I know, it sounds crazy, it sounds weird, but it's absolutely true. Your job as a marketer is to find those audiences on these social media platforms.
The way to do this, of course, is to identify your business' target audience. Sadly, most marketers don't even bother with this. Instead, they just look at social media marketing as a simple task of finding traffic. That's it. That's the name of the game. That's all there is to it. If you want to be successful, you need to be clear about who your target audience is.
And believe me, this is not always easy. You're going to run into the temptation of making "educated guesses" about who your target audience members are. Most of the time, that doesn't work. Thankfully, there is an easier way. The more you take random shots in the dark, making all sorts of wild guesses, the more money and time you will lose.
There is a shortcut here: Find your competitors. Seriously. Just find them. And, let me tell you, regardless of how weird, esoteric, or seemingly "unknown" your niche is, there will at least be one competitor on social media.
Find that organization or business and let them do your niche and target audience research for you. Since they've already started and they are already speaking to your audience, find out who your competitors are and look at their social media profiles.
Reverse engineer who they're following. Pay attention to who they're targeting. Look at how they categorize themselves. In the simplest terms, pay attention to the hashtags they use with their content.
These clues should be enough to give you an idea of where to start. This way, you get a head start. You're not completely stuck in the dark and absolutely clueless as to what to do. Instead, you have some objective tried and proven information you could work with.
