Facebook has clearly established itself as a strong medium for small business marketing. In a way, you can think of it as an entirely separate business website. You can use it to directly engage your customers with marketing information, company updates, promotions, contests, media sharing, questions, surveys, and other engaging content.
Add this value to your social profile and they’ll just keep coming back. Facebook is a fantastic resource for stimulating discussion and social interaction with your business if your actual company website is not a great fit for your content marketing strategy.
As you grow your Facebook following, you’ll begin to notice trends in behavior or common interests and occupations among your customers. Pay attention to this information! Facebook makes it easy to discover a niche community within your target audience with significant social outreach.
A niche community is subclass of your market that has a very specific common market interest. Photography, blogging, cooking, and parenting are just a few examples of popular online niches. You could sell swimming gear for example, and find that most of the people who buy your products are life guards.
Niches are extremely valuable and can allow you to specifically target these sub markets to increase revenue and brand loyalty. Here we’ll discuss more about how you can build up your niche following, and how you can use the same processes to build new followings in other niches.
From our own experience
At USB Memory Direct, we’ve had a really interesting and unique niche that we’ve really started to develop over the last 6 months with spectacular results. Professional photographers can use custom usb drives as a great medium to distribute their work on. After all, optical drives on laptops are becoming less and less prevalent and cloud storage offers very little opportunity for branding. This made photography an excellent niche market for us to approach.
In this time frame we’ve been able to do a significant amount of work to build our photography niche following. This includes:
- Adding valuable, niche-specific Facebook content
- Targeting influencers for outreach and promotion
- Participating in Facebook networking events
The results have been a huge gain in our social footprint and Facebook becoming one of our largest sources of internet traffic and revenue.
Adding Niche Specific Content
The idea here is to really come up with a strong content marketing strategy for Facebook that capitalizes on timing and value. Facebook filters out what may appear on news feeds based on social interaction, comments, and shares from your followers. So just because someone likes your Facebook fan page or subscribes to your Facebook profile, doesn’t mean that they’ll always see what you’re posting. Figure out when they’re most likely to be active on Facebook by analyzing how many people saw your posts during different time frames. Facebook offers a really good social insight tool for free that allows you to see just how many people saw your post and how many people were talking about you at different times throughout the day.
Next you want to post valuable content that targets these niches specifically. If you have a large number of musicians that follow you, try to post content that would relate how you products or services would best serve that community. Ask questions or post titles that are eye-catching and you know that particular niche would really want to share with their own followers and friends.
Targeting Influencers for Outreach and Promotion
Strong influencers vary according to the niche community. Overall, a good influencer would include celebrities, bloggers and basically anyone who has a large and active online following that fits within your target audience.
This includes people that are already following you. Actually, I would definitely start with my own Facebook fans first for targeting influencers. These individuals already like your company and your products, so they’d probably be the most willing to actively promote and share them with their followers.
Check out the news feed section and comments for the past couple of weeks. Is there anyone who continuously gives positive feedback or has a particularly large like count for their comments on your posts? If there are some, then they probably could be influencers.
Participating in Facebook Networking Events
Facebook events can bridge the gap between the offline and online marketing world. You could have a ton of fans from a niche community that just aren’t very active on social media. Sure they liked your page and comment once in a while, but the whole Facebook scene really isn’t their thing. Advertising networking events on Facebook is a great way to get these people out of their shell and even share your company with their close buddies in the industry.
Figure out the perfect date to schedule an event where you could market your products or services or just hang out with the community. Try to gear it towards the summer or holiday seasons when most people take time off. Again, this decision is niche-specific, so make sure you do your research! Not only will this give you exposure to your niche community, but you’ll also have the opportunity to attract the attention of your local community as well.
Author:
Vincent Clarke is a Social Marketing Specialist for USB Memory Direct, a wholesaler of custom USB drives. Check out their Facebook page to see examples of niche-targeted content strategies.