Audience mapping
You know what your customer profiles are but that does not mean you know whom you should target on social media. The art of audience mapping for digital communication platforms is your values and mission in practice.
Social Media platforms may have a feature to sell products, but that's only a fraction of its purpose. Remember how Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok started? No ads, no marketing, or high expectations towards profits. That's when people fell in love with the opportunity to learn about their friends and meet new people all around the world. The platforms were not as user-friendly as they are now, but that phase encouraged so many of us to join digital communication communities.
For those B2B marketers who still try to figure out why the B2C companies adopted social media effortlessly. While they just wasted money on the pricy advertisements. The answer is wrong audience mapping. It doesn't mean that your customer personas are incorrect. There is not much space for mistakes in researching a few of your clients. However, your targeted audience for social media communications is a different group of people or at least a much wider and more general selection than you thought. It does not say that account marketing is useless - the idea of targeting people who care about your product or service is useful for B2B or niche technology companies. Having said, your social media communication is about the idea that you want to nourish and spread around rather than finding users for your creations.
A simple example - would be if you sell tennis court equipment, your social media strategy should not be centered only around the product. Instead, try communicating ideas that would interest this sports community. That way, you have the creative freedom to share content about anything starting with different level athletes to inspiration be more active and choose tennis specifically for that purpose. Show the mission and values of your brand as well as diversify your social media accounts. We like seeing faces, reading real-life stories, and having a feeling of someone's purpose. Incorporate some of the insides of your company employees. There must be some colleagues that can show that you also live by these values inside your organization. When you have this social media strategy in order, you will see that the audience for your posts is much wider. They have more than a specific job title or workplace. Even though sales representatives will not have them buying instantly, your social media presence will have a purpose. Reach and impact on your brand's image will improve significantly. Lastly, probably for the first time, your social media representative will have some numbers to show for you and themselves.
I know what you are thinking now: but we don't need those teenagers seeing our content. They are not our potential clients anyways. It is indeed true, however, let's get back to what I said earlier - selling online is only a fraction of social media's purpose for companies (B2B especially). So what are the other goals of marketing that we should take into consideration? First of all, capturing attention and spreading awareness around your brand and its unique: culture and goals. That's right - studies showed that people choose brands that inspire them whenever their values correlate with brands' identity. The brand's name is one of the first indicators of wheater you will win in the competition. Social Media is a powerful tool, but you have to use it right.
