About once a week, my letter box contains a real estate flier. “We recently sold a house in your area for a record amount,” declares the smiling, yellow-jacketed headshot. “Have you considered selling your home?”
Not really. We’re renting, so I’m pretty sure our landlord would have something to say about it. We hope to buy in the area next year, but with this sort of messaging we’re not exactly optimistic we’ll get a fair price.
It’s the wrong message to the wrong audience. For every homeowner motivated to sell at those booming house prices, there’s probably a potential buyer scared into putting property plans on hold.
Unfortunately, marketers often treat social media in a similar way, broadcasting the same content to the widest possible audience regardless of the different needs, wants, and expectations of their followers.
Sure, you may have worked hard to attract relevant followers who have at least expressed a general interest in your brand. But if your product or service attracts more than one distinct customer profile, you may risk falling into the same trap as the real-estate flier.
Get to the right people
Of course, we already know this. Email marketers can get quite fanatical about segmenting their lists into smaller and smaller, highly targeted groups. The entire SEO industry is about presenting the right content to the right person at the right time with the right keyword. And social media advertising is sold on the promise of being able to reach highly specific demographics.
But while we can be more targeted with promoted tweets, Facebook ads, and LinkedIn campaigns, we usually save those tactics for our key content – the new quarterly eBook or webinar announcement. It’s not always practical to use paid social to promote today’s blog post or the latest service update.
