Allocating Social Media Posts For Multiple Target Audiences

I recently wrote about the importance of determining your target audience in order to keep your marketing and posts focused. Further to this post, I’d like to examine how you can target your posts as a business owner when you have several target audiences. Rather than writing and targeting all your posts to suit all your target audiences, you should determine how your audience is divided and allocate posts accordingly.

Who Makes Up Your Target Audiences?

Here’s what I mean. Let’s use a board game cafe as an example. Your main target audience may be the local gaming community; your secondary target audience members of the community within walking distance; and your tertiary target audience families of school age children.

First, estimate how much of your business or potential business lies with each group, to a total of 100%. That might look like this:

• Local gaming community: 50%
• People within walking distance: 30%
• Families with school-age children: 20%

Now, determine what is important and of interest to each group. Certain sales, promotions or events may be geared toward one group or another. For instance:

• Local gaming community: when your cafe acquires new, highly anticipated board games; collaborations with local gaming groups or retailers; offerings in your own retail section.
• People within walking distance: community events you’re taking part in; daily specials; opportunities to meet their neighbours.
• Families with school-age children: your child-friendly beverage or food offerings; family night promotions; best games for families; educational opportunities.

How to Allocate Your Posts

The easiest way to break it down is to picture 100 Tweets, Facebook posts or Instagram photos. Of those 100 posts, 50 will cover the topics that are relevant to the gaming community; 30 will be geared toward those within walking distance; and 20 will be specifically written to interest parents of school-age children.

Each month when you write your posts, this is how you will focus the topics. Rather than write 100 posts, each one attempting to appeal and be relevant to all three of these groups, you can laser-focus each post to be far more effective.

The numbers aren’t static, however. You may want to shift them monthly or quarterly depending on your marketing focus. If the board game cafe determines that parking can be an issue in the neighbourhood and the local community is a good source of potential customers, they might increase their posts for the local community to 40% and decrease their other two groups by 5% each.

In addition, you would be well-served to brainstorm a long list of potential topics for each segment right at the start. You can refer to this list later when you write posts.

Flummoxed by the process of determining your target audiences or how to target them effectively? I would love to help you examine your market and focus your social media efforts. Give me a call to find out how your social media marketing could be so much more effective!