Selecting the appropriate social media platforms for your outdoor brand can be a daunting task. Having a presence on too many networks can dilute your efforts while focusing on the wrong ones can limit your reach to your target audience. Here are our tips for choosing social media platforms for your outdoor brand.
Understand Your Target Audience
The first thing you need to do is understand your target audience, which you should do when creating your overall marketing strategy.
Different demographics are active on different social media platforms, and you need to work out which platforms they are.
Ask yourself some key questions. How old is your audience? Where do they live and/or work? Do they consume more videos or photo-based content?
For example, platforms like Instagram and Tik Tok are for a younger demographic, whereas Facebook, this platform tends to be used more widely with 35+.
Understanding where your target audiences live online and how they use the different social media platforms will help you to determine which platforms are right for your outdoor brand.
Identify Your Goals
Identify your overall business goals and think carefully about how each social media platform can help you achieve those goals.
Some platforms are better for building awareness and driving ‘top-of-funnel’ campaigns, while others are better at converting.
So many businesses that are active on social media get frustrated when they’re not seeing results. This often boils down to the fact they’re on the wrong social media platforms or posting the wrong type of content.
Identifying goals and knowing what you want to achieve means you won’t be wasting time or money, and you’ll see greater results from your social media marketing efforts.
Research Your Competitors
Looking at which platforms your competitors or others in the industry are using can give you a clue as to which social media platforms could also work well for you.
Not only should you be looking at which platforms your competitors are using well but look at the social media platforms they’re not using so well.
- How do you know which social media platforms are or aren’t working?
- Which types of content aren't performing well?
- Are the posts being engaged with?
- How many followers do they have?
- What type of content are they creating?
- How often are they posting on those platforms?
Building a picture of how your competitors use social media and how their audience engages with their content will give you a better idea of the social media platforms that are right for your outdoor brand.
Understand How Each Platform Works
Let's say you've decided Instagram is the right platform for you - it’s the social media platform your audience hangs out on, it’ll help you achieve your goals, and you know you can create visual content that will help you grow.
But how does Instagram actually work?
Do you know about all its features like stories, reels, lives, story highlights or post collaborators?
Without knowing how each social media platform works and how it’s used, you’ll never be able to achieve your full potential.
If you don’t have the time to learn how to use all features on every social media platform, it’s worth speaking to an expert and/or outsourcing. This can save your outdoor brand a lot of time and money and you’re likely to see greater results a lot quicker.
Be Realistic About Content and Resources
If you’re marketing in-house vs outsourcing to a content marketing studio, you have to be realistic about the content you’re able to create and the available resources.
Managing several social media platforms and creating bespoke content is hard work!
You need to be realistic about the time and energy you can dedicate to running each channel. If you’re not outsourcing your marketing or don’t have dedicated team members to help you create and publish content, you could be taking on too much.
Consider limiting the number of platforms you’re choosing to be active on or pre-planning and scheduling your content on scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Buffer. There are a number of tools out there that will make your life easier when it comes to your marketing.
