Building the Right Online Community

When targeting a demographic for ads on social media, we have a core philosophy at Socialike – start with a niche audience and build from there.

Below are some essential vernacular to better understand our philosophy in terms of a social media marketing agency:

Frequency – The number of times people in your audience are exposed to your marketing message.

Niche market – A segment of a larger audience on social media that can reach a particular frequency with a reasonable ad budget.

Mass-market advertising approach – Trying to appeal to an entire market rather than a targeted group.

Thought process:

All brands want to build up their community; it’s one of the coolest aspects of social media. Targeting a niche community helps focus a brand’s messaging and builds out their “super fans,” who will then help organically spread the word of the brand. When using a mass-market approach, a brand may lose that focused message. As a result, they won’t be able to capture their audience’s attention and fewer people will want to follow them.

The conversation that spurred me to write this blog:

In speaking with a brand that was interested in our social media services, the founder said they wanted to target “healthy moms” or “yoga moms.” A lot of brands might believe this is a well-defined audience. If your budget is big enough, you can achieve a particular frequency to establish brand awareness. However, if you are not working with a large budget, this will not achieve a frequency that will reach the desired level of brand awareness for potential new consumers.

For the average brand, it is necessary to narrow down the audience to a more realistic size to achieve the desired frequency. Consider narrowing the audience even further so it’s not just “yoga moms” but “yoga moms that love to cook,” for instance. This one extra layer of audience targeting will have many positive benefits.

• Because the audience is smaller, you will reach a frequency tipping point that establishes brand awareness.
• It will help focus your marketing efforts.
  • Target your influencer outreach and give you clout
  • Streamline your content generation

All this is to set you up for success by establishing your brand within a community, creating “superfans,” and building out data for when you want to open up your marketing to the masses.

• Socialike relaunched an Ayurvedic oral health brand and focused on an audience of
  4.2 million people who have an affinity towards Ayurveda.
  • By focusing our strategy on this core group of consumers, we were able to achieve an engagement rate and click-through rate on our ads 2x the industry average.
• We also relaunched a refrigerated probiotics brand that is sold behind the pharmacy counter by targeting the 140k people on FB and Instagram that have ‘pharmacist’ listed in their job title.
  • The size of the audience was not the focus. Instead, we wanted to focus on a subset of social media users with actual influence at the point of purchase.
  • Since launching this campaign, we have established the brand as the pharmacists’ choice for probiotics.

– Ike