“Who is my audience and where are they hanging out?” This is a question we all have to ask ourselves when we begin creating content online. Let’s start with an overview of how to find out who our ideal client, customer, or community member might be and then dive into the top social media platforms.
Demographics
You want to create a following by honing your brand voice and appearance. But, you can’t do this without first being clear on who you are marketing to. Ask yourself these five questions:
1. Do you know for certain there is a problem your product or service solves and if so, what is that problem?
2. Who will your product or service help?
3. Why would your product or service help?
4. What does your product or service fix and what are the results people can expect to see?
5. How will your product or service help them specifically?
The answers to these questions will help you zero in on your target audience.
Using Social Media To Build Your Brand
Your brand is beyond a company name. It needs its own personality and traits that people can recognize. This is what we call ‘brand awareness’ – when people can automatically recognize your brand from these features. In order to create brand awareness, you need to have a particular style that dictates the look and feel you will use for ALL of your marketing material. You don’t want to deviate from your brand look wherever people will come into contact with your product/service. An easy way to do this without investing too many resources is to create a style guide.
Style Guides
It is worth the time to get this right. However, don’t get too lost in creating your style guide during your social media infancy. You want to spread the love of your brand consistently across all social platforms and provide a subtle hint about who you are. The trick is to invest as little money upfront as possible and allow your brand identity to percolate using branding basics 101.
Your style guide includes the basics of your ‘look’:
What are the main colors for your logo?
What are complementary colors to add a more diverse, but still limited color palette to your marketing repertoire?
What should your logo look like?
What fonts help reflect your brand?
When using images, what should they look like? Should they be whimsical and humorous; edgy and in your face; subtle and sophisticated; black and white, or in color; Kodachrome or sepia-toned? Remember, because images appear in a continuous stream, they need to carry a recognizable style that shouts your company name. You’ll start to get the hang of it, and things will begin to feel more consistent as you hone your brand. We recommend experimenting with this over time to see what feels both authentic and gets the response you’re looking for from your audience.
While your style guide refers to the visuals of your brand, your brand voice creates your brand personality.
Brand Voice
Your brand voice is the tone and manner you use to speak to your audience. It creates a particular tone using consistent language that will resonate best with your followers. When you nail the right tone you can avoid losing people who might have trouble understanding who you are.
This is how you speak to, reach, and retain your followers. If you can keep your brand voice consistent, you can avoid disappointing, or even confusing, followers.
Watch the video for more information on finding your target demographic and learning more about the various social platforms.
Video Transcript:
What is my Demographic?
00:00
Okay. The next thing I wanna talk to you about is your demographic. If you have been working in your industry for a while, this will probably be so simple for you.
You’ll just think, oh, I know my demographic just visualize what customers are coming through the door. Who’s signing up online. Who’s buying your product, like who is that person? There’s probably a variety of people who fit in this category. It really depends on your brand, but by knowing your demographic, you’re gonna know how to better market yourself, how to educate your audience, how to educate your demographic, how to educate your customer, your future customers, and also where the hanging out online.
This will help you really determine how best to use these platforms. Now I’m just gonna tell you straight up that I feel like Facebook and Google are the best platforms to start on for most things.
Targeting Your Demographic To Support Your Strategy
00:42
Now, this is not every group, every demographic, but for most things, it’s this nice balance where you can have Google, which is the long game of three to six months to start getting traction. You start really getting traffic after that six months.
From that traffic, you can get conversions, community, and so on. Facebook is a really nice way to get traffic pretty quick. Within the month, or the first two months, you can start getting traffic right away.
You can start getting people to your website and, and start really testing your product. A nice strategy that involves both platforms can really help you win long term by working really hard up front and getting the returns long term on Google, and also building up some nice traction upfront on Facebook, and really getting to know your community, finding out where they’re hanging out, what they’re thinking, what they’re saying, what they like, what they don’t like.
Some Industries are not Welcome on Facebook
01:33
That isn’t always the best method. Some industries are not allowed on Facebook at all. Some industries are extremely regulated on Facebook and extremely regulated on Google.
You might have to go to another form of social media in order to reach your people. And that’s okay. I’m gonna show you on how to find your demographic and what questions you need to ask yourself to really make sure and understand your demographic.
What Problem Does Your Product or Service Solve?
So, first things first, do for certain there’s a problem, your product or service solves. And if so, what are those problems? Take a moment, write those down, understand for yourself, what is the problem that you’re solving?
Cause really people will use money to buy experiences, to buy things and to buy really solutions to their problems. If you are solving a problem, you need to know what that problem is. What is your, what is, what need are you fulfilling?
Who does your product or Service Help?
02:27
The next question is who will your product or service help after that? Why would your product or service help?
If you’re selling gum, for example, your product may be for people who experience bad breath or for people who want to feel less anxious. There’s actually studies that have been done that show that if you chew gum, it does something in your brain that turns off your fight or flight response and helps you calm down.
Maybe your audience is people who are struggling with anxiety and really wanna keep functioning well. The demographics of that, you could do a little research, do a little Googling, who struggles with anxiety can be your question to Google.
How Old Is Your Demographic?
Google probably has a lot of answers for you about the age and where these people are hanging out. Are they more densely populated in the Rocky mountains? There are a lot of statistics around that.
Where Does Your Demographic Live?
03:12
Are they living in cities or out in the country? Like those kinds of things can help you really understand is going to best served by your product or your service.
What Results is Your Demographic Expecting to See?
Next question. What does your product or service fix and what are the results people can expect to see? By using your product or service, by participating in your coaching, by being a part of your community, what do they get out of it? Maybe it’s a, a sense of reassurance.
Maybe it’s a community, maybe they become more healthy. Maybe they become more empowered. Maybe they get the house of their dreams. They can get that car they’ve been looking for.
They get to be more creative. They get to, enjoy a nice story, like whatever it is that you’re giving out there, what do they get out of it? How will your product or service help them specifically?
Knowing Your Demographic can help you fine-tune your marketing message
04:00
Just really fine-tuning and understanding what you’re offering. This is you with you understanding your authentic message, your authentic brand, your, your service, your product, answering those questions will help. From there, let’s understand where our demographic is hanging out. So let’s say you’ve narrowed it down.
You’re like, well, my demographic is typically women between the ages of 45 and 65, which again is a huge part of Facebook is where our older community is hanging out. You go in there and you go, okay, well, let’s look at, ’em like, this is particularly for a dog product, but this is nice because you can look at it and be like, okay, grandma, Joe, you is 55 to 75. She’s interested in her dog’s health. She’s got money to spend on her dog. She wants her dog to be a member of the family. This is a companion of her.
04:50
She cares deeply about them. What’s nice about this is in your branding. You can work on voice. It’s like, how do you talk to this person? How do you as a brand speak, how what’s off to you as the owner of the brand, as the business owner, as the small business owner, and also, how do you really get in the mindset of your person?
How do they want to be talked to when I write captions on posts on Facebook or on any platform for Google, when I’m writing an article, when I’m writing to someone, I visualize that person, the whatever a person in my life represents that demographic.
If you don’t know anyone in your life that fits your demographic, go find them, figure out where they’re hanging out in the physical world and go hang out with them, join a club, go to park, like whatever it is, that’ll help you authentically meet these people, spend time with them, ask them questions.
Connecting with your Demographic
05:39
Don’t tell them how things are, just observe to absorb. I like to sit next to people who are older than me, because most of my demographic age groups are older.
Most of the products and clients that I work with are working with people who are older than I am. They’re in their forties and fifties and so on. I actually like to sit in the room and watch them scroll, like, how do they scroll on Facebook? What do they click on? How fast do they scroll? Are they what intrigues them?
Making Content for your Demographic
What images are pulling them in those kinds of things so that my brain is always gathering this kind of data. I’m gonna show you more on how to shorthand that as we go along. Just visualize that person and talk to them.
If you’re making a video, I want you to visualize that you’re talking that person and talk through the camera to them, ignore the camera, ignore the mic, ignore the medium, but really like reach through it and reach that person.
06:26
Say, when I write a caption and when I write a title and when I write an article, I’m really trying to share it with pretend they’re my best friend. I’m trying to help them understand why I’m so excited to share it with them so that this will help you with your tone, another potential demographic millennials.
Here, I mean, this is of a jump, but it really helps you understand what are these people focus on? This is the same products, same set of products, but millennials have a different approach as to why they want to give their dog the best and why they’re willing to invest in it.
Their motivation is wildly different and it’s cultural. And it’s also experiential. That’s, this is a great way to really understand, like what’s going on. As you can see, there’s a lot more quotes that involve hashtags over here because of the specific demographics.
Branding is an area to put more focus on after 50k followers
07:14
I don’t spend a whole lot of time heavily on branding for my clients that are, that have smaller pages. If you have under 50,000 followers, I recommend doing a couple of these principles, but really you can just kind of, as long as you understand your demographic, as long as you understand who you’re talking to, you can skip straight to making content and figuring out and getting your feet wet.
It’s more important to get out there than it is for it to be perfect. If you wait for everything to look and feel perfect, you’re not gonna be seen. And, and honestly, so many, so few people are going to actually see you in the very beginnings of what you do, that it’s okay for it to not be perfect. Once you have a lot of momentum, you can really work on focusing in, on the quality of the brand.
Have Your Logo, Catch Phrase, Tag Line, Voice, Etc ASAP
08:00
The reason why it’s important long term to have some of your brand elements in place is because you want people to see your brand and immediately feel the feeling that you’re trying to project.
Brands and products and services, and communities all come with a certain feeling. If you can attach them to a feeling, either of like, I’m enough, I’m empowered. I’m, I’m powerful, I’m strong, I’m informed. I’m educated.
Like those symptoms of a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling of, like get in touch with how a brand makes you feel it’ll help you get into someone’s subconscious.
They’re scrolling on Facebook and Instagram, or they’re scrolling on wherever they’re scrolling, they see your stuff, and they immediately recognize it on a subconscious level before they see who shared it before they look at how many likes it has the font, the color, the feeling that the image is portraying the voice, the vibe, all those things will be like, oh, they immediately know that’s their favorite influencer or that’s their favorite brand.
Connection is Key to Good Branding
09:11
They just know because they feel connected. It feels personal. It feels real and authentic. That is what’s so important inside of branding and inside of social media is the ability to reach someone, have it feel real because you are making it real and then using and leveraging that relationship to benefit both of you.
You give and give and give, and you educate and you share, and you inspire and you empower. When they’re ready, they buy your product. They buy your service. They share it with their friends and family who need it or want it, or could use it.
It becomes a win-win relationship right there. With logos and with branding, once you get more, an advanced level, you can start to look at like all the different variations of how to do like a, a longer logo and then how to do an actual icon.
Setting up a Logo, Icon and Profile Image
10:01
This is icons are important for either the little square profile image on a brand, or it can be used as like a watermark on videos, on images, things like that. It just shows us a touch of branding. So people know that it’s from you. This is an example from Spotify, how they do it. They also have a brand guide of what not to do, and you can hire brand experts, or you can follow some brand guidelines online.
You can Google it to develop a brand for yourself. I do recommend knowing the exact hex color for your brand, so that you get it right across the board.
There are programs out there to show you how to do that, which we will show you later in this course, but pretty much when you pick a color, make sure you also get the hex color so that you can find it and recreate it over and over again.
Which Social Media Platform Should I be on to Reach My Demographic?
10:50
As you can see, they talk about how to use it, how to use the content, what fonts to use those kinds of things, and what else you’ve can do for this particular brand. Now I want you to be able to use the tools that are out there to find and understand your own audience.
You can even just type into Google, where do women ages, whatever, hang out online and there’s articles on that. I’m like, okay, well, let’s click on what’s the top article, social media, where your demographics are, and it actually will break down and show you.
So you’re like, oh, what about Twitter? Bam, Twitter women, 24% female, 23% male. Well, okay. I don’t know where the rest percentage are, but maybe they’re unclaimed, which is totally accept. Maybe a specific demographic you’re going after. Now you can see the age range. It looks like Twitter’s just younger, relatively.
11:46
You can see where they’re hanging out. You’ve got a nice balance between urban, suburban and rural, and then you can see some of their income levels. It looks like actually 32% of people on Twitter have a nice, yearly income that could be useful for purchasing whatever you’re selling.
Getting to know that’s important, then, as part of this, you can look at what are, or some, what are the stats for some of the other platforms out there?
Pinterest Demographics
Here’s an example of, I just Googled Pinterest demographics, and it came up with total number of monthly active users. You can see 300 million, that’s a little less than the population of the United States.
How many, how many are from the us? 85 million, a total number of Pinterest pins. It’s a widely used platform, total number of Pinterest boards, total number of Pinterest users and so on.
12:45
What you can do from here is look at, oh, well, if you find out that, Hey, your people are really heavily hanging out on Pinterest, then you would Google, what kind of color schemes work on Pinterest? What kind of, what times of days should I post for Pinterest? That kind of stuff. Giving you outside of the realms of what we’re gonna be talking about on the course.
Facebook and Linkedin
Where to go from it from here, but know that we’re gonna heavily focus on the Facebook strategies and the strategies that should work cross-platform. LinkedIn is fantastic, cuz it’s Facebook was a few years ago, shorter videos work really well.
There’s a lot of opportunity on here to educate and share content. And it actually performs really well. You can see a lot of the users are actually not in the us. And, and there’s a lot of really interesting statistics here, but a lot of the users are very it.
TikTok Demographics
13:34
It’s a nice platform to reach your people. Okay. After LinkedIn, we have a up and coming platform called TikTok. So TikTok is fantastically addictive. What it is it’s mostly a younger age group, but it is being downloaded wildly.
These are statistics from 2018 and I am telling you, it is still exploding. It has gotten even bigger are they’re short form videos, less than a minute. They’re, they feel very natural, very organic and people are super engaged.
They typically listen to it with sound on, which is not always the case for videos and on other platforms, it is a great way to meet and connect with some younger crowds. There are some older people on it and they’re fantastic open minded and typically have a great time.
The ads on there are very engaging. Like I feel like I actually want to watch them because I know their short form because I know you’re gonna get your message to me in a way that’s interesting and entertaining.
Niche Demographics
14:28
There’s a lot of really cool functionality there. With that being said, this is some, these are some of the statistics from TikTok from 2018. 66% of the users are under 30. It did start out heavily on in as an app india, but has continued to grow in other areas of the world. There’s a large population of young people of cause players of artists and actually a lot of LGBTQ+ community hangs out on TikTok. There are definitely all types of people on TikTok.
However, a lot of what we’re seeing is people who feel safe and comfortable sharing and expressing themselves on that platform and sharing and expressing things together and really being able to freely flow. If you have a product or service that involves either an alternative community or an artistic community or a music community, or a, maybe a fantasy or gamer community TikTok might be a fun platform for you back to my, what I was talking about earlier.
Google Demographic Data
15:31
The reason why I suggest Google is because they have been around for 21+ years. That means Google had just became an adult recently. Maybe they can legally drink. Now I I’m mostly teasing. Google what’s nice about Google is it has been around for a while. They have settled their algorithm for the most part.
It’s pretty predictable what they want from us in order to perform over here. SEO or search engine optimization is the tools we use to create content that will rank on Google. If someone types in a question on Google, you wanna shop, show up as the top answer. If you don’t show up as the top answer, you wanna at least show up in the top 10 on this front page. If you are on the second page or more of Google, you are probably not gonna be seen. Like the statistics are astounding.
Google SEO Basics
16:19
You want to be on the front page. You want to be the first answer. Now people typically type questions into Google. If, if you just type in the word Google, let’s say, actually let me use a different example.
If you are trying to understand more about your Yorky, you’re probably not gonna just type in Yorkie. I mean, you might, but even though this word gets a ton of search volume, people are much more likely to type in like “how to feed my Yorkie”.
This is what’s known as a long-tail keyword. It’s got several words in it and you can actually work on ranking for specifically long-term keywords. It’s a lot easier than trying to rank for the word Yorkie you can rank for both. If you rank for this, it’ll, it’s much more easier to rank for the short form keyword or the single keyword.
Why You Should Be on more than One Platform
17:05
This is, this is some of the stuff that we’re the reason why I recommend investing in what you’re doing in your blog on your website, making sure that you are strategically trying to rank for Google keywords so that you can get traffic all the time and diversify.
You don’t want to be one platform and only one platform because if something goes wrong, if you get hit with a page quality violation, if Facebook shuts you down, if your demographic moves or changes or something else happens, you don’t wanna lose all of your traffic.
You don’t want to lose your business. You don’t wanna struggle. So diversify get on Google. 90% of the world uses Google. That’s why I’m specifically talking about Google. Obviously, there are other search platforms. You’ve got Yahoo and other ones out there, but for the most part, most of the world is still using Google.
17:57
That’s why Google has become a verb. Oh, well, I’m gonna just google that. It is a platform that is pretty, been around for a while. They do make changes, but most of those changes are geared to words, creating more authenticity, more authority on their platform.
Compliance is Key when working online
If you are speaking and using their platform in a way that both shows your authority, your knowledge and is, medically safe and also, compliant with their standards, you’re gonna thrive over here and you’re gonna do, you’re gonna get the traffic that you’re looking for, but you gotta play by the rules.
That’s why we’re going to go over that in this course, and much more deeply in the actual SEO course that we are launching side by side with this course. Take a look and make sure you educate yourself on what is compliant. What is not. Google is very sensitive around health brands and very sensitive around financial brands.
18:49
You just, you need to be careful. You need to know what you’re talking about. You need to make sure that you are sourcing things properly and we will dive into that more heavily. The next thing I wanna talk about is Facebook. Facebook’s 15 years, so they’re just younger, still a teenager, still figuring themselves out.
And we know that is happening. Hardcore for them as they are pulled in front of Congress recently to actually become accountable. Since then, Facebook has really worked hard to become compliant in the world’s eyes. They realize that they have a platform that they do have to regulate. If you can just imagine the nightmare here, Facebook as is really trying to make sure that you feel safe and feel comfortable and feel connected. They really are pushing Facebook groups a lot at this moment, but really they don’t wanna get in trouble with the government.
19:31
They don’t wanna do things that are gonna get them in trouble. However, if you can just imagine if you owned Facebook and you had users creating content every single day, millions upon millions of pieces of content going out, there’s no way for you to hire a big enough team to regulate that and to monitor that.
They use AI heavily to make sure everything is compliant and stuff still slips through the cracks, but they work really hard to keep it clean. Sometimes they do what I call Facebook purge, where they will go and they will actually take down Facebook pages that are not being compliant.
They will hit you with page quality violations if they think you’re trying to play by the rules, but they, but you’re, you’re messing up here and there now, even with all your best intentions, there is still a certain amount of, you’re probably gonna get a couple things wrong here and there.
20:16
Facebook has third-party fact-checkers that are crawling their platform, looking at your content. If you share something that is fake, you could get, what’s known as a fake news quality violation, and there are ways to resolve that step one don’t ever remove the post.
If you get hit with a page quality violation, watch our page quality violation video for how to fix that, do not remove the post. If you remove the post, probably won’t be able to get it off your page. Having a page quality violation does is in the short term, it limits your traffic. So it’ll, they’ll strangle your reach.
They’ll make it hard for people to see what you’re posting and they could eventually shut you down. They could shut down your personal account and just make it really hard for you to ever advertise organically get traffic. We want to be compliant and we’re gonna teach you how to be compliant with images.
21:00
We’re gonna teach you how to be compliant with videos. We’re gonna teach you how to be compliant with articles and just your whole message, how to be compliant with what Facebook wants and make sure you understand what they don’t want.
You can be on board with what’s going on there and how to work with their third-party fact-checkers. Facebook right now is crawling all the way back to I’ve seen so far back as 2016. They’re looking back and looking even at your quotes and they’re like, mm, Bruce Lee, didn’t say that. You have to make a correction in the caption and resubmit it and get them to remove that page quality violation.
There are other types. So violations, there are violations for spam. There are violations for clickbait. There are violations for just incorrect information in general. We’re gonna have a whole video on how to take care of that.
Facebook Demographics
21:37
So don’t you worry, we’ve got you. Facebook demographics, the 43% are female. 57% are male. Most of them have about 155 friends. 62% are seniors, age 65 and up 72% are between the age of 50 and 64.
This is a fantastic age group for people who are aging, they are looking for, new things to spend their money on. Sometimes their kids are grown. If they had kids, they’re either slowing down their careers or getting out of their careers.
Oftentimes not always, but oftentimes they have money and they’re interested in spending it. Shopping isn’t is a fun thing for them. And, targeting them can be very effective on Facebook. That’s why I said most of my graphic hangs out here, for my clients. I’ve spent a lot of time really getting to know what works on Facebook and let’s see, 88% of users of the age of 18 to 29 are on Facebook.
22:41
Of the people who are this age, 88% of them do have a Facebook. Even though they say that kids are hanging out on Snapchat and other platforms, they still often have a Facebook account.
There is a way to reach them here. You can use Facebook targeting to reach them and then, and use some of that. Some of the leverage on Facebook to target them on other platforms and so on.
Most of the people on Facebook have an income over $75,000, which is fantastic. If you’re looking to make money on Facebook and then they talk about some of the other users across the globe. Facebook can still be a fantastic tool if how to leverage it. Right?
I do recommend if you’re starting a Facebook page, that you also marry it with a Facebook group, Facebook loves when you make groups, nurture your group, build your community, advertised to your group, between running a Facebook group and a Facebook page, you should be able to build a very solid following and good traffic to your website.
Instagram Demographics
23:40
Instagram is another platform that is owned by Facebook. Facebook bought them a couple years ago and they have a good amount of users. As you can see over a billion users, over 500 million people use it. Every single day stories is where a lot of the platform is moving to.
You’re scrolling on Instagram, you’re seeing, what’s known as the grid and that’s where you’re gonna have a, the post that people are just posting onto their Instagram.
If you click on stories or click on their little profile icon, you’ll see Instagram stories, which is about 15 seconds and less videos that people can use to either show their day or brands can use to show storytelling, things like that.
I highly recommend using Instagram stories. You can’t put links instagram stories at this point until you have over 10,000 followers, but that can be a good way long term to drive traffic.
24:27
What’s interesting about Instagram is even though it’s not link heavy, if you build a solid following and people feel really engaged with you, they will go to your biolink and click on it and you can use tools to make it so that when you click on your biolink, there’s like five different links that come up that they can choose from that kind of stuff.
You don’t have to feel is limited, but it’s much more intentional when it comes to driving traffic. It’s a great platform to advertise on which you can put a link in any ads you decide to do.
That’s not a problem. Instagram and Facebook, I just want you to know that when I talk about rules on Facebook, just assume they apply to Instagram. Instagram.
I understand as a different platform, when it comes to the actual types of content, you can put up and format of that content, but I’m telling you when it comes to the general rules of what you can, and can’t say, just assume Instagram is the same rules and, or will apply them soon.
Watching Social Platforms and Search Engines Age
25:14
Now this is something else to think of because of Facebook being 15 years old and Google being 20 years old, which I already clicked away from that, you can assume that the platforms that are younger are kind of following in their footprints, just a little now they’re they are unique.
They are different, and they have different goals and they’re trying to go in different directions. When someone is already ahead of you and has created a huge wave of momentum, it’s easier to follow behind them, just enough to avoid pitfalls.
You’re a smaller company, like let’s say you are Pinterest or talk, and you’re watching what’s happening with Facebook. You understand that once you get to a certain size, you will be held accountable to the world governments and to other types of regulations. They are going to be trying to implement principles earlier on. And, eventually, that are similar.
Copyright Law, Fake News, Etc
26:0
Upholding copyright law, upholding fake news, making sure that you’re compliant with posting things that are true and factual that are scientifically sound, that kind of stuff is going to be important long term.
Make sure that you are being compliant as you’re building your brand, as you’re building your content, as you’re building your messaging. Even in, even if you are a medical doctor and you make a medical claim, you have to say that it may help with whatever illness, or whatever it cannot say that it will, which is an obvious thing to a medical doctor.
If you are working on a medical doctor’s team and you’re making content for him, for her, then you need to make sure that your content is stated in a way that will be compliant with Facebook and will be compliant with Google. You cannot make claims that aren’t true.
26:44
You cannot create things that are just gonna mislead people, cuz they want to create platforms that people want to come back to over and over again. With that being said here, this is the basics of understanding your demographic, understanding where they hang out.
Now we’re going to dive deep into Facebook and content to make sure that all the tricks and tactics for how to thrive over there. So stay tuned.