The Social Lab (Ep #1) - Understand your customers on social and stop selling to them

‘For a brand to have a successful social media campaign, they have to build an understanding of their customers and stop selling to them.’

In the first episode of We The People’s new podcast, ‘The Social Lab’, Dr Karen Sutherland from the University of the Sunshine Coast joins us to unpack why it’s so important that marketers spend time to know and understand their audiences on social.

“There's lots of methods of audience research to understand your customers. You could do the traditional methods of interview or even joining and using the platforms that they use,” Karen told The Social Lab.

“Facebook has a very powerful audience insights tool that you can use to really hone into different age groups, demographics and things like their preferences and the pages they follow. Even just looking at your own analytics to understand what people are responding to and what they aren't responding to.

One of the challenges of social is that people want immediate results. Sometimes organisations and businesses approach social media thinking that it's going to give them overnight results and really, it's a long-term relationship management tool.

It can sometimes be a year before you see the results that you want, but it's just being consistent and continuing to make the effort to provide value to your audience. That's the most important thing, and over time the returns will come.

The idea that you're going to get instant results is a bit of a fallacy. It takes a while for the algorithms to share the content to where you want it to go and even if you're running ad campaigns on social, it can sometimes take at least a week before it starts ticking over and doing what you're hoping it does in reaching the right audience.

When you stop selling and start helping your audience with content that is important and relevant to them, it actually draws people to you without you trying to sell to them. When your audience comes to you willingly because you built that credibility and trust with them, avoiding the hard sell on social media and actually focusing on providing value; this really is the most important thing to do.

In the case of universities as an example, they often miss using social media for engagement and focus on student recruitment, not building a community with students who are already at the university and with the university’s staff who can give these students such an amazing experience that they will come back and tell everyone else about it. But current students are often just sold to and not engaged with.”

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