Learn about your target audience via Facebook
Learning information about your target audience is an essential feature of any sophisticated marketing strategy. This part of marketing is highly relevant whether you are engaged in search engine optimization or in social media marketing. If you do not know much about your consumers or the kind of consumers that you aspire to, your efforts will tend to be less successful than they would otherwise be. In other words, poorly targeted marketing is a bit like going shooting at night. Although it is possible to acquire some useful information by the intelligent use of Google Analytics, it is often feasible to supplement this data with facts gathered from Facebook.
Google Analytics is one of the really useful SEO tools in part because it permits you to discover pertinent facts about the users who have been frequenting your site. For example, it is possible to discover that users are coming to the site from specific locations. Knowing the countries and regions which are where your potential customers are coming from is a great boon when it comes to marketing. It can enable you to tilt the focus of your campaign to maximise positive outcomes.
However, even Google Analytics has its limitations. It cannot tell you useful data like the ages of users or handy facts like their gender. If your online firm is in the retail sector and seeks to sell modern clothing, it can be an asset to perceive who is frequenting the site in these terms. If shoes are items which are for sale, it can help your marketing strategy if you know that roughly 54 per cent of your users are female. This type of knowledge could lead you to focus your efforts towards the retail of women’s shoes, if the current search engine optimisation or marketing strategy is gender-blind.
Facebook is one way of discovering more about your target audience, facilitating rich data to be gathered. This means in practical terms that you can use a Facebook Fan Page to get age-related and gender-based information which can then be fed back into the marketing strategy. If the fans of your retail site are typically female, you have the option of concentrating what you offer on women or you can try to develop ways to bring more men to your site. Similarly, if your users are mainly under 25 you can adjust the tone of the site to suit that audience or you can attempt to make a stab at getting more mature individuals to access your site. These options would not exist in practical terms if you were ignorant of the statistics concerned.
The worlds of social media marketing and SEO are never static, because the big players can never rest on their previous achievements. That is why perpetual vigilance is required. Facebook can also supply you with weekly statistics on the progress of your page by email. This service provides details like the number of wall posts or comments and so on, and involves a comparison with last week’s performance. At www.seoconsult.co.uk we understand that statistics gathering is integral to successful internet marketing.
