Where Is Your Audience? Pt. 1
The internet and technology has lowered the cost of developing marketing material. After watching a few YouTube videos, you can learn how to design a print ad on Microsoft Publisher, or film and edit a high quality video or commercial using your smartphone. While it can be helpful to have marketing experts designing marketing material, tools and technologies are available to make the experience much easier and cheaper.
So where should you use your marketing material to promote your local business? Should you use Social Media? Print or Newspaper ads? TV or billboard space? Blogs? We’ll refer back to the first question we posed in last week’s post to answer this question: Where is your audience?
It is important to know who your audience is and where they spend their time. Based on their demographics, are they on social media? If so, which platform? Do they drive, watch TV, or read the newspaper? What websites do they frequently visit? We are going to dive into three types of mediums to discuss which audiences the particular medium as a whole may be good at targeting. First, we’ll start with Social Media.
Social Media
In addition to creating social media accounts for your business to post updates, pictures, and other content, Social Media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have emerged to include ad-running platforms. These ad platforms make the creation and launch of ads on social media inexpensive and simple for even the least tech-savvy user. The end user has control over the budget spent and can see the impact that the advertisement is having. Additionally, ads can be run for a very short period, and if they are ineffective, they can be cancelled. It is very cheap to fail and improve social media advertisements.
With all of the social media platforms available, it can be difficult to identify which to use. To decide which platform to use, it is very important to understand your target market, as different groups of people navigate to different platforms. As Gary Vaynerchuk (the Entrepreneur from last week) says, social media platforms start young and age up. For example, in the mid-2000’s, Facebook was launched with college and high school students, and then later adopted by their parents, and then even grandparents. Similar shifts are happening with Instagram and Tik Tok. The below graphic shows the age distribution of social media users by platform.
Want to target people aged 55+? Look at Facebook. Professionals ages 35-54? LinkedIn is a good bet. Youth and young adults ages 12-34? They spend their time on Snapchat and Instagram, which means that you should too. The article here shows more data on Social Media usage amongst varying demographics.
We use a rule of thumb to summarize which social media platform to use and advertise on: The older the demographic that you are targeting, the older the medium that you should use.
Let us know if this post on Social Media is helpful to you and your business. In the next post, we will discuss “traditional” local media including TV, Print, Radio and billboards.