How to Use Social Media Marketing to Attract a Niche Audience

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle AKA the 80/20 rule. It is used in math, game theory, and, of course, it has a peculiar application in business as a whole and social media marketing in particular.

Just in case, the rule states that 80% of sales come from 20% of clients.

What if someone told you that you can make this 20% into 50%, 70% or even 90%? You’d probably need to invest in a new pair of trousers with larger pockets in the brave new world of limitless opportunity.

Alas, math is math, and there is no going around it.

Or is there? Let’s take a look.

Niche Audience in Social Media Marketing

With 2.23 billion people logging into Facebook on a monthly basis, a well-planned social media campaign is powerful enough to elect presidents, break alliances, or sell a whole lot of useless $1 trinkets from China.

That said, Facebook’s biggest strength is its greatest weakness. Sure, there are eyes willing to see and ears willing to listen among the billions of people using the network, but trying to sell a product or a service to all of them is the literal equivalent of standing with a cardboard sign in the middle of Manhattan.

Will people see you? Probably. Will they spare a moment of their precious time to care? Hell, no.

Would you like to know a secret? There is a single common trait that unites both the Trump election campaign ads, the Brexit vote ads, and hand-made iPhone case sellers on Facebook – from big to small, all of them use meticulous targeting. They choose to find and cater to a niche audience – a group of people who actually known to give a damn about what’s being sold.

So, if put simply, a niche audience is a small sub-group of a brand’s main target audience. These people have very specific interests you can laser target to get the biggest bang for your ad budget buck.

They are the people you’ll need to fill your juicy, bulk email list of Marketing-Qualified Leads. They are the guys to use your remarketing campaigns on. They are the bread and butter of your soon-to-be humongous army of brand advocates.

The real question is: how does one use social media marketing to attract an engaged, niche audience?

Start With Your Homework

Gone are the days when men in suits drank scotch and smoked cigars in their oversized offices thinking about a slogan or a jingle destined to become all the rage for a couple of weeks or so.

Marketing today is ruled by one thing and one thing alone – data. Luckily, the handy little spies we carry around in our pockets to watch an occasional video or two on YouTube are meticulously capable of delivering just that. Who would’ve thought, right?

Feel free to put the colossal volumes of gathered data to good use and boost your business. How?

Start with thinking about who your ideal client is. What is their pain? How your business eases it? Start simple with mapping out the following:

Your preferred location
Target audience demographics
Their interests and preferences

Now that the basics are covered, let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Log into your Facebook ad insights, type in your location and let the media giant do the magic for you. Set the location to the place your business operates in like, let’s say NY.

You’ll learn that out the people using Facebook in the area 51% are women, and 41% are men. You’ll also learn that 40% of the people are single, 65% have a college degree, a lot of them work in arts and media (16%), healthcare and medicine (17%), but the lion’s share is managers of all shapes and sizes (24%).

You’ll learn how much people in NY make per household, which pages they like, what are the most popular hobbies in the area, etc. All that from simply looking up NY in your ads manager.

Ads Manager

Then think about who your audience is not. Let’s imagine that you have opened a brand new burger shop. You serve amazing organic burgers with farm-grown patties and home-brewed beer. An Instagram account and a #foodie hashtag seem like a perfect fit for your marketing endeavors.

Now think about the people who follow the #foodie hashtag. Are there vegans amongst them? Sure. Are there PETA activists? Definitely. Do people who don’t drink beer enjoy their #foodporn filled feeds as much as the other guy? Yes, yes, and yes.

Neither of them is representative of your ideal target audience though… But people who follow some of these hashtags might be.

Get Up Close and Personal

The second step of your audience analysis requires a bit of finesse so put you’re your sneaky hats. It’s time to do some spying!

Take the data you’ve already gathered to create a portrait of your perfect buyer. If you are selling a series of products and services – try to come up with the perfect persona for each of them. Or better yet, talk to actual customers who have already had the pleasure to buy from you.

These personas will shortly become the backbone of your segmented and highly effective niche audiences.

Now the fun begins.

Proceed to their social media profiles to see:

Who they talk to?
How they talk, which language they use
What content they share
What do they ignore?
Who influences their decisions (perhaps the name of a certain blogger will come up more often, etc.)?
What makes them tick
What triggers them

Write everything down and fill up the blanks in your perfect buyer persona profiles. The need result should be something like: for my burger shop, I am looking for a 20-35-year-old mostly male audience from New York that is into guns, video games, Game of Thrones, baseball, and grills.

Please note that while this description of an audience is here for an example, it came from a well-researched persona profile that we successfully used in a series of ad campaigns.

Content is King!

Now that you know who you are talking to, the time has come to produce killer content. Do your people like Game of Thrones? Great, use a GoT meme in your ads with a punchline leading to your service.

They are into grills? Awesome, help them find the best one and offer the alternative to the headache of cooking at home – your juicy patties.

That said, it’s not the content that you share, but where you share it that matters. Your own page is fine and dandy, but you have a list of the most popular Facebook groups your audience visits on a daily basis. Put it to good use.

Micro-Influencers

Did you know that 49% of consumers depend on influencer recommendations nowadays? or that nearly 70% of teens (your new gen audience) trust influencers more than traditional celebrities? Or that influencer campaigns earn $6.50 for every dollar spent?

Alas, traditional influencer marketing comes at a pretty penny. A YouTube “celebrity” or an Instagram “star” may charge you several thousands of dollars for one organic ad or product placement.

Luckily, we have micro-influencers. they are basically the same thing but with a smaller, niche following.

Their help comes at a fraction of a cost but it bears far greater results. Just think about it. These micro-influencers are working with niche audiences that tend to be tight communities with a lot to share.

70% of micro-influencers create content on a daily basis. 48% do it even more frequently, meaning there’ll be plenty of screen time for you to shine.

More on the matter, 84% of these talented guys and girls tend to recommend either a product or a service at least once per week with 99% of them believing in what they are selling.

To top things off, their engagement rate is seven times higher than that of your traditional “big deal” influencers.

And, of course, their cheaper rates is a splendid cherry on the icing.

To Sum Things Up

Social Media is a behemoth of marketing opportunities one simply can’t afford to miss and yet it’s the biggest strength – its size – is also the giant’s greatest weakness. Dividing and conquering, as per the advice or Julius Caesar is a strategy that’s well suited for both war and marketing.

Get to know your audience, talk to them like you would to friends, not customers, approach them to where you are close and personal, and then strike with a killer sales pitch. You’ll never miss a blow. That is a promise!

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Eric Wills

Eric is an SMS marketing specialist at BSG World who is always looking for ways to improve his skills. He’s always traveling when he's not at the computer. He likes to share his thoughts and believes that his articles will help a great number of people.

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How to Use Social Media Marketing to Attract a Niche Audience - April 26, 2019