How Law Firms Can Leverage Social Media For Audience Targeting

Want to Learn How to Use Social Media for Audience Targeting?

You know by now that social media makes an impact. In fact, Pew Research recently stated that 14% of Americans have changed their opinion on an issue based on something they saw on social media. That means you have a real opportunity to connect with your audience and convince them to take an action – schedule a meeting, discuss an engagement, or sign on as a client. However, broadly advertising to everyone on social media is not a strategy that’s going to get results. It’s critical to find and engage with the right audience at the right time. Fortunately, social media can be a great channel for performing that research. Here’s some of our top tips for researching a prospective client audience using social media.

• Create buyer persona profiles. Obviously, targeting too broad of an audience will lead to low conversion rates and waste your marketing dollars. To take a personal approach, develop persona profiles for each audience that you believe to be a current client or prospect. Include demographics and motivations, and information about how they interact with brands and their social media preferences.

• Find out your social media audience size. Each social media platform has its own tool for determining information about your audience. For example, Facebook Business Manager can help estimate the size of your preferred audience on Facebook by letting you select several factors – such as gender, interests, etc. –  to determine how many people are available to target. If your audience seems small, consider expanding based on certain criteria, or changing an offer to be more appealing to a larger group.

• Survey your audience. The best way to find out what appeals to your clients and prospects – or might interest them in the future – is to simply ask! Once you’ve segmented audiences, use a variety of the free tools online to create and send a survey. You might consider enticing your list with an offer or a gift. The responses you get will help you develop marketing ideas and plans, and give you key insight into why clients choose your firm and how to keep them coming back.
• Perform more research using messaging apps. There are so many messaging apps gaining popularity, such as WhatsApp, Telegram, and Viber. So far, they are widely underused for marketing research. Users appreciate having quick access to firms to get information, share their opinions or issues, and have questions answered quickly. You might even consider using chatbots to help – they’re fast and easy to use, and will help you gather and analyze data (check out our upcoming blog post on this topic!).
• Connect! Once you’ve built your audiences and taken things a step further by having them complete a survey, you should leverage the data you acquired to build a stronger brand presence on social media. Taking into account all of the new targeted information you have, build out a robust content plan, including what you’ve discovered about the right time of day to reach users. To appear as a constant presence, you need to be readily available to answer questions and engage with users.

Still not sure how to use social media for audience targeting? We can help you develop a comprehensive social media plan with the right mix of curated content, original thought-leadership, updates, corporate information, and more. There’s certainly a science to researching the right way on social media. Let us help you get the most from your social channels and generate the results you are looking for.