It’s a fairly straight-forward concept—take your marketing message and your business to where your customers and potential customers already are. In many cases, that means social media. Who is your ideal customer? Which social media platforms do they use most often? That’s where you need to be. Let’s dive in a little deeper (and really extend the fishing metaphor to its outer limits) into the fish where the fish are concept.
Know Your Audience
Do you know your ideal customer? What do they do for a living? What are their problems, interests, likes, and dislikes? In order to catch the fish, you have to know the fish. This is where your “Customer Persona” comes in. A customer persona is a hypothetical person (or persons) that you create to represent the consumer you are trying to reach. If you are already in business, this should be easy! Look at your best customers and use them as a model for your customer persona. Find out what social media sites they frequent, pages and influencers they follow, and what types of content they like. We will be writing on the process of defining your ideal customer in the coming weeks, so check back or watch social media for more information and tips on that topic!
Find Your Fishing Spot
Once you have the right information, focus your marketing efforts on the platforms that your customers frequent. If you are marketing to business professionals, you likely want to spend time on LinkedIn. If you are marketing to college-aged women, Instagram is probably your best bet. Dropping your pole in the right pond is essential (sorry, we can’t help ourselves).
Use the Right Bait
Figuring out where to reach your audience is a great step, but it’s also important to craft a message that appeals to them. Using the information you gathered in your customer persona, your next step is to create marketing content that focuses on their unique interests, goals, and frustrations. Oh, and make sure you have an hard-to-miss call to action, as covered in our last post. A well-crafted message with no call to action is like bait with no hook!
This isn’t new information—it’s a marketing fundamental. Get the right message to the right person. This strategy has been proven effective for as long as marketing has existed (far in advance of the creation of the social media fishing hole). So what are you waiting for? Our metaphorical marketing fishing is just like regular fishing—it isn’t hard, but it does require some preparation, perseverance, and patience.
Once you learn to “fish where the fish are,” all you gotta do is reel ‘em in.
