5 Things About Social Media Marketing Your UK Client Wants To Know
There are numerous ways your business can with connect your buyer persona or target market over the various different social media channels. Often used social media marketing uk strategies include favourites, likes retweets, reposts, polls, contests, videos photos and gifs. These are all great methods, which when done well, can increase your marketing advantage. Geographic segmentation, however, is one crucial aspect of social media marketing that not enough businesses are capitalising on today.
One often-overlooked strategy for social media marketing in the UK is that of targeting your market by region. The practice of segmenting audiences into localised, targeted, specific groups, “prospecting” these groups and generating sales leads from them is simply not used enough in social media marketing.
Early business success often comes from traction gained locally. Facebook, for example started out at Harvard, before spreading to colleges in America prior to crossing the US borders and the oceans.
This blog post advises on the most effective regional segmentation methods that can be used in the UK and we can narrow down the focus to cities such as London, Manchester and Sheffield. the most effective techniques to start targeting specific audiences and use them to generate leads.
1) Facebook Business Pages
When setting up your business pages take the time to ensure that you specify the location and radius that your company operates. It is all too easy to try and set your focus globally, but this is a quick way to waste time and money. Make sure that your business is focused around your local area and when selecting your demographics for you page ensure the location is specific to you and your potential customers.
2) Paid Social Media Targeting Practices
Paid advertising on social media has proven to be very rewarding for companies. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest all have paid advertising platforms that allows you to zero in on leads.
These paid channels target users that you specify, placing your content in front of the specified audiences. Each channel differs slightly but generally includes:
- Age
- Sex
- Location
- Occupation
- Interests
Ensure again that your focus is zeroed in on your local area and be honest! This will be the best use of your money as potential users seek relevance.
lets users target individual posts based on gender, age, language, relationship status, education, location and interests; that’s a lot of targeting criteria your business could be using right now for free.
3) Multiple Social Media Accounts
Some companies have multiple accounts that are skewed towards the types of content that their market appreciates.
You will find that businesses a customer support account separate to the accounts where they would run competitions. In this way users have a place to openly discuss problems directly with a company over social media, where other users may be able to participate
International businesses create separate accounts to tailor content for regions and languages audiences. As part of your social media marketing campaign for the UK why not set up a UK centric social media account in addition to your more generic one?
4) Google My Business
Google+ has often been considered a lesser social media platform save for the fact that it is owned by Google. This does give Google+ a lot of relevancy. When formulating your Social Media Marketing Strategy for the UK be sure to add your company to the Google+ and Google My Business in particular. Part of the process asks that you register you business location, which is verified by google sending a verification code to your address.
Completing this simple but lengthy task opens a lot of SEO bonus points and helps people who are looking for your type of business in your area to find you.
5) Leverage Groups & Lists
Groups and list can naturally draw specific user segments to them. They can be closed or open, allow users to bounce discussion between themselves, potentially representatives from your company.
Open groups facilitate broad conversation, while closed groups give you insights into trusted or qualified users, based on whatever criteria are set. LinkedIn groups are an especially viable segmentation tool companies can use to reach professional audiences based on interest and industry.
Join groups and make lists of your particular market segment that are based in the UK. This gives a lot more relevance to the group and the conversations that you are listening in to and joining in with.
Segmentation and targeted social media publishing are incredibly valuable practices that not enough companies and marketers are taking advantage of today. However, segmentation is just one component of the perfect social media strategy for business. To get the most out of these platforms, you’ll also have to consider your intent in posting, your posting behaviours and, of course, the quality of what you have to say.
Adding that additional location factor to your segment may seem restrictive but you will find that it actually opens those doors more. What people really want when they search is relevance to themselves and location is a huge factor in that.
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