Chapter 1

Building An Ideal Customer Profile

Building The Foundation

Before we get started, we need to talk about a few things that are going to be valuable before we get into the nitty-gritty of it all.

Could you skip this section and probably understand the rest of what you are about to read very well? Definitely! But if you hang in with me for a minute or two, it will really complete the full picture of social media marketing and developing your strategy.

How we view social media (ecosystem)

Social media marketing is far more than just making some stuff and posting it. In order to be effective with your social media strategy, you need to start thinking about it in a totally different way.

The way I see it is kind of like an ecosystem. In nature, ecosystems are perfectly structured and balanced with every part of it as important as the next. Taking one piece out of that system means disaster and makes the whole thing fall apart.

While our social media ecosystem is far less complicated than what you would find in nature, it is important to think of your strategy in this way. The balance of content, strategy, paid advertising, and your website is what will make or break your entire overall strategy.

While your strategy might work to some extent if you remove one of these pieces or don’t give it the attention it deserves, you certainly won’t see the full benefit of what social media has to offer.

We are going to talk about each of these pieces in this guide and show you just why this ecosystem idea is so important.

What is the goal of Social Media Marketing? (set expectations for yourself)

Now that we are done getting all philosophical talking about the ecosystem, let’s get down to the details of setting expectations and understanding the goal of social media.

Now there are many goals that you could pick for your social media strategy, and each business is going to be a little different with how they want to approach this. Some businesses might choose sales or leads as their #1 goal. Others might just want to get in front of as many people as possible.

However, to us, there is one goal that stands above the rest and accomplishes both of those things at the same time.

Engagement.

This is by far the most important goal that the vast majority of businesses should have when it comes to their social media strategy.

I know… shocking that the goal of social media is to be SOCIAL right? In all seriousness, engagement should almost always be your number one priority because it is the baseline for making social media work.

When we talk about engagement, we are primarily talking about things like likes, reactions, comments, and shares, but engagement also includes things like clicks, video views, and a few other things that show an interaction with your content.

Almost all social media platforms prioritize content based on the amount of engagement it receives. This means that making your strategy engagement-focused should make social media platforms want to prioritize your content over others.

While not perfect 100% of the time, the general rule of thumb should be More Engagement = More Reach.

And what does more reach mean? The short story is… More people learning about your business and brand, which in turn should lead to more sales.

We will get more into this topic later, but just know engagement is almost always the #1 goal of a social media strategy (Unless you are using paid advertising… but again… we’ll get into that later!)

Ideal customer profile creation

Who is your ideal customer? Most of you can probably answer this question immediately without giving it too much thought. After all, in order to create the business you created, you probably had some idea of who your future customers were going to be.

The problem is that 99% of people don’t go far enough. It is not enough to just know the basic demographic information about your ideal customer to build a successful social media strategy, you need to go deeper, WAY deeper.

Let’s use an example to help with this. We will use a real client of ours that is a personal trainer in a major metro area. Here is how we approached helping her create her ideal customer profile to be the most effective with her strategy.

I cannot emphasize this point enough so I will let a ridiculous amount of bolded letters do it for me.

DO NOT SKIP ANY OF THESE STEPS.

That might have been a little aggressive… Sorry about that!

Building your ideal customer profile is so important because every decision that you make from this point on is going to be based on this profile – including the content you are going to create.

Next up, let’s talk about what content you should be creating in Chapter 2: Content Creation For The Non-Content Creator.