Social media is a must for any business but getting started can be harder than it looks, especially if you want to do it right. I’m going to tell you how you can kick start your outdoor brand's social media marketing journey.
Work Out Who Your Ideal Customers Are
Before setting up any social profiles or creating any content, you need to know who your ideal customers are. Knowing who you’re targeting will enable you to create bespoke campaigns that get you results.
A brilliant exercise for identifying your target audience is creating customer personas.
For those who don’t know, a customer persona is a fictional character that represents a segment of your target audience.
You start to build a picture of where this ‘customer’ might hang out online, where they live and work, what might stop them from buying from you, what specific problems they have and so on.
Once you know everything there is to know about your ideal customer, you’ll have a clearer understanding of the social media platforms you should be on and the type of content you should be creating.
Your Brand Story Is Your Customers Story
Every piece of content you create for social media should reflect your customer's story.
But what do I mean by a customer story?
A customer story is a narrative that encompasses facts and feelings that your customer knows/experiences because of your brand.
Unlike old-school marketing, which is all about showing and telling customers about certain products or services, your customer brand story needs to inspire and evoke emotion. It also needs to be relatable.
There are three key aspects of any good customer brand story, and these are:
- Problem – What key issues or problems your customers are experiencing?
- Solution – How can your brand help that customer fix or resolve their problem?
- Result – How was your customer affected or what results did they see from working with/buying from your brand?
As a quick example, let's say you sell waterproof jackets.
- Your customer wants to stay dry when exploring the mountains. They want a jacket that is durable but not at a cost to the environment.
- Your plastic and chemical free waterproofs are what they need, tested in the most extreme conditions.
- This will help them to keep dry when their adventures push them to the extremes.
If you can create a story based on the above three questions, you’ll be able to create effective social media content that gets you results.
Plan Your Key Messaging
As you start to post more content across your social media platforms, your target audience will start to build a picture of your services, products, business values and brand ethos.
Having a consistent message across all your social media platforms and content is crucial in helping potential prospects understand your offerings, build trust, see you as a credible source and help them remember your brand.
If you’re pushing different messages across different platforms, it can start to confuse your customers.
Always know what your brand is, who you’re targeting and what you want to achieve from your social media marketing. It will ensure your outdoor brand has consistent messaging across the board.
Choose the Right Platforms For Your Brand
Choosing the right platforms for your outdoor brand is vital in achieving your goals.
The first thing you should have done is work out who your ideal customer is. During that process, you will have identified where they hang out online.
Every demographic has a preferred social media platform and it’s your job to ensure your brand is active on the platforms that your audience uses.
For example, Tik Tok is brilliant if you’re targeting young consumers, whereas LinkedIn is better for connecting with business professionals who are likely to be slightly older.
Not only do you need to think about your audience, but think carefully about your brand and the type of content you want to create.
Create Content That Adds Value at Least 3x Per Week
If you’re wanting to grow your audience, brand awareness and boost sales, you need to create content that adds value.
The best type of content that does this either inspires, educates, or entertains.
Creating content that does one of these three things will help you to engage your audience, gain authority & trust, and increase your chances of them buying from you when they’re in the market.
Not only do you need to produce high quality, valuable content, you need to be posting consistently. I would recommend posting at least three times a week if you want to see any sort of growth.
If you can post more than three times a week, you’re onto a winner, but always focus on quality rather than quantity. Sometimes posting every day or every other day isn’t sustainable which results in content being created that isn’t helping you achieve your overall business goals.
Test, Measure, Adapt
Every piece of content or social media campaign you push out needs to be tested and measured.
Not testing and measuring your marketing efforts is like driving a car blindfolded, you don’t know where you’ve been or where you’re going.
It’s really important for your outdoor brand to understand what has worked well and what hasn’t worked so well in order to adapt and tweak your social media marketing strategy going forward.
Constantly adapting your marketing efforts based on your analytics is how you’re going to see real results and make big leaps towards achieving your goals.
