MARKETING
5 Tools to Find Your Audience on Paid Social Platforms
Preparing to launch a new social media marketing campaign can be a daunting task. The first big hurdle you have to tackle is figuring out what platform or channel is going to best achieve the results you need. The second is determining how to reach the right audiences on those platforms. This article will overview five tools that can be used to identify profitable audience segments on some of the leading social media platforms.
Google Analytics
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the best place to start with social audience research is not a social platform at all. Google Analytics is a great source for evaluating your current website traffic and, in particular, the highest-value interactions that you’d like to see more of. Before you begin drafting a campaign proposal, take some time getting to know your customers through reports like:
- Geographic Location
- Demographics
- Device Use
- Content Engagement
- Top Conversion Paths
- Time Lag
- Interests
These reports should give you a pool of information from which you can begin to draw insights. You can overlay behavior and audience composition data to develop segments and personas that will be highest value to your company. That is the seed for your social targeting strategy.
Facebook Page Insights
Facebook allows for a similar assessment of your Page Followers using the Audience Insights tool within your Business Manager. You can view how People Connected to Your Page compare with the benchmark of Facebook users overall. Facebook’s Audience Insight Tool shows relative data for:
- Demographics
- Job Title
- Interests (Page Likes)
- Locations
- Languages
- Device Use
- Engagement
You can also compare custom audiences (e.g. connected to your page and live in a selected region, or with a selected education level or relationship status) to define more specific segments.
LinkedIn Demographics
Another powerful tool at the disposal of advertisers utilizing LinkedIn is the Demographics breakdown, available on the account, campaign group, campaign, or ad level.
To utilize for audience research, advertisers can select retargeting campaigns using website visitor or list upload audiences. From there, LinkedIn will show actual volume and engagement rates broken down by:
- Job (function, title, seniority)
- Company (name, size, industry)
- Location (metro, county, country/region)
The LinkedIn segment breakdowns are also available in the left sidebar during campaign creation. While this view only shows the percentage makeup rather than volume and engagement, it is valuable for determining whether any exclusions or additional targeting layers are needed to reach a desired subset of your website or list audiences.
Quora Topics
Targeting research on Quora can seem intimidating. You’re given estimated weekly impressions during ad group creation, but how can you know whether those are truly reaching the right audiences? Before you start with building a new campaign, navigate to the organic side of Quora (the feed) and do some native research.
Start by searching the topics you think are most likely to fit with what you intend to promote. Reading through the questions that are being asked and answered should give you a feel for the type of information users are seeking. It can also tip you off to irrelevant questions or topics that you want to avoid. Researching natively on Quora rather than relying solely on the Ad Manager will also help you choose the right targeting option. For example:
- Topics targeting works well when you want to reach users reading broadly about a subject or where your product/service is a direct fit for the problem that topic addresses
- Interest targeting works well when you want to reach users who have previously engaged with a subject but are not necessarily on that topic page now
- Keyword targeting works for instances where your product/service answers questions that align peripherally with multiple topics but are not cleanly matched to any one particular subject
- Question targeting or retargeting are a great fit if you find specific threads that perfectly match your audience’s intent and have a high volume of followers and weekly impressions
Hashtagify for Twitter
Twitter Ads are a surprisingly underutilized option for paid social marketers. If you’re new to Twitter Ads, get the scoop on targeting options first. Criteria like keywords, followers, and events can be tricky to sort out manually. Hashtagify.me is one of my favorite free tools to conduct research on Twitter audiences: search any hashtag and it will show related terms, top accounts, trends over time, and more.
This will help you generate ideas and find segments that connect with your product or service. Best of all, you can plug those criteria in during Twitter ad group creation to get a range of estimated reach that will fuel your forecasting model.
In Conclusion
Finding and targeting the right audience is key to successful social media marketing. The next step is forecasting spend potential for your paid social campaigns and drafting a compelling pitch to drive buy-in from the decision-makers for your organization. These essential research steps will be explored in-depth alongside other strategic and tactical execution tools at the Paid Social Workshop during Hero Conf Austin in April. Register now for yourself or your team to save on conference + workshop passes.
MARKETING
Trends in Content Localization – Moz
Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.
Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.
Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.
MARKETING
How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy
MARKETING
More promotions and more layoffs
For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.
The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.
Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes
Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643.
Here are the median salaries by role:
- Senior management $199,653
- Director $157,776
- Manager $99,510
- Staff $89,126
Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.
One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%).
Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.
Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams
Employee turnover
In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”
Men and Women
This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.
In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.
Methodology
The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents.
Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.
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