How to Find and Connect with Your Ideal Clients through Social Media
The marketing team of any industry is always stressing over the search to find their ideal clients. The rage of competition makes it even more difficult for marketers to decide whom to approach and how to approach. Finding the ideal customer is no easy deal. However, social media has brought a sigh of relief to many of us. Social media is the largest platform for networking and communication. In the past, companies have addressed their prospects and received hopeful results too. But how can social media help identify your ideal customers? Marketers have come a long way in channelizing the mode of marketing for good business. When a marketer targets the audience, every small detail holds importance, such as age, occupation, income, problems, obstacles, behavior, objectives, and the list is endless. These details keep the marketers on the right track of finding and connecting with their ideal clients on social media. The social platforms have broad audiences and their humungous records of necessary details, location, gender, job, choices, and preferences. This makes it convenient for marketers to find ideal prospects. This information is sufficient to lay an outline of your audience and execute a crisp marketing campaign.
Marketers have a growing interest in social media campaigns for their marketing efforts than any other for the apparent reason, i.e., quick response. According to research, 80 percent of marketers claim increasing engagement across multiple social media channels is their top goal.
Whether your targeted industry is healthcare, real estate, or ecommerce. Social media is one of the best ideal place to connect with your targeted audience.
The decision to pick the right platform for your social media campaign plays an integral role in deciding the future of your business endeavors. Let us first understand the factors that determine the persona of an ideal customer that fits your requirement.
Factors That Determine The Image Of An Ideal Client
Identify The Ideal Client:
The image of the ideal customer should be relatable to our service in some manner. The question that continually stays in the minds of marketers is, "who is the ideal customer?"
There are multiple ways to find your ideal customer:
- What do you wish to sell?
- Who do you wish to sell?
- Which field is your target zone?
- What age group does your prospect belong to?
Various questions like these will serve an answer of your imagination to an ideal customer.
Image Source: http://online-consulting.blogspot.com/2013/01/managing-effective-segmentation.html
Well, John Lee Dumas has given a quick answer about identifying your business avatar. By this, it implies, you will want to create a fictional or imaginary persona of your ideal client. The clearer your vision is of your ideal client, the better it is to find the target on social media, which resonates with your expectation.
Just as we can say, a guitarist won't be the ideal customer for a legal firm, but can definitely be an ideal client for an event company. Their short bio will leave a valuable piece of information that will help you approach them accordingly.
Another example, if a social media user has a lot of space in their bio while talking about their location, you can freely assure they value their location. This person has secure local connections and might be interested in creating an appropriate location-based marketing message for such types of followers.
Similarly, if someone is usually talking about their achievements and business in their profile, it might be kind enough to approach a value-adding element. The final takeaway for you is that every social media profile speaks for itself; you just need to see it with keen eyes.
Know The Size of Your Audience:
Once you have understood what your ideal clients look like, you can use various tools or methods, as mentioned in the below video, to anticipate the size of your audience.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2z3BKBTEa8
For instance, if you want to reach USA based B2B entrepreneurs, then LinkedIn will guide you through the list that matches your requirement. If your audience is too small, you might need to change your method to expand the client base. On the other hand, if your client base is too big, then you may want to target a narrow niche to begin. LinkedIn works towards expanding your scope and lightening your way for better search options.
The Most Appropriate Time To Be Active:
Social media moves faster than light! But honestly, the posts, pins, and tweets get lost in the enormous activities that happen every second on social media. Tracking when your prospects are active online is a critical element of effective content delivery.
There are various tools out there that will help you suggest the best time to post on Twitter and Facebook. Not just this, it will also tell you when it is the ideal time to drop a post on social media, so it helps in getting viewed by maximum prospects.
However, if your audience is usually active during regular business hours, you can assume that social media is a part of their work. Therefore, posting in-depth blogs focused on advanced methods and tactics around social media could engage such an audience better.
Survey Your Audience:
Image Source: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/573012752565778068/
Customer survey is one of the all-time useful methods for B2B marketers. Surveys help you connect with the customers in a way that is convenient for them. To optimize your social media campaigns, survey plays a crucial role. It is cost-effective, and the path is showing as to where your audience spends maximum time online.
In your survey, ask your customers a few questions like these:
- Which social media sites do they use frequently?
- What websites do you visit to seek information on pricing strategies, data cleansing, and other appropriate topics of your business?
- Do you take an interest in reading blogs?
- What topics interest you on the internet to read?
You can use Google Forms to collect answers to your surveys. It is a great way to collect feedback on live events too. Go to your survey form results and select Form > Show Summary of Responses from the drop-down menu.
Research Client Behavior:
Tracking client behavior online is crucial for connecting with your ideal clients on social media. If you are looking for the expansion of your business or start a new venture, you can use online research in a case like that.
The Pew Research Center has organized segmentation of where your audience spends time on social media channels. You can check this chart from Marketing Charts to see the top social media channels' estimate based on gender, age, education, etc.
The Right Content At The Right Place:
Content plays an integral role in connecting with your ideal customers. By analyzing the smaller social media sites and your customer's choice, you can narrow down their interests' sites. Follow the B2C and B2B trends of content marketing as per your niche to simplify your research. Websites like Quora, Instagram, or Pinterest help marketers figure out what type of audience they are interacting with. They have a different audience for their respective platforms.
People on Pinterest have different requirements than people on Quora. As per research, top-most companies on Instagram are experiencing a per-follower engagement rate of 4.21 percent, i.e., 58 times higher than on Facebook and 120 times higher than on Twitter.
For instance, if your prospects spend a lot of time on Quora, then chances are high, they are more likely to choose solution-oriented topics. Try to identify all the traits of site visitors, and by analyzing it, you can try sharing likeminded content on their social profiles.
Companies must focus on creating content that runs on similar interests as the site visitors. Often, marketers organize a small survey on-site to ask the audience questions related to their preferences. Suppose your audience enjoys the celebrity news. You would often need to post content that includes celebrities and their contribution to society, or their upcoming shows, etc.
Once you have attained the results from the survey and have reviewed the necessary details, it is the right moment to put the key elements to use. According to reports, 66 percent of marketers found new leads only after spending six hours a week on social media. Below are some useful tips for connecting with your ideal clients on social media platforms that best fit your business.
Now that we have the detailed insight about the factors that shape your ideal audience, Let’s seek some details about the most prominent social media platforms for B2B marketing and how they can benefit you.
How can you find your ideal clients through Facebook?
One of the most prominent ones of all is Facebook. Over 2.6 billion users exist on Facebook, making it the world's biggest social network. If you are seeking prospects on Facebook, then you must target them with their location with the help of Facebook Ads Manager.
Facebook has everything that serves your requirements.
By simply logging in and heading over to your Business Page Insights, you can seek the option of “People” in the lower left corner.
You will witness an easy breakdown or column based segmentation of theof audience the following categories: audience location, gender, and age range. To get more audience insights, you can visit your advertising account under the Business manager section.
Image Source: Neilpatel
In the below mentioned image, you can see the highlighted section “Lifestyle.” Lifestyle section will allow you to pin down the clues and identify the customers appropriately.
Image Source: Neilpatel
This means you will become aware of the type of audience you are approaching and their preferences. This tool helps you find prospects and people of similar interests that may be valuable for your campaigns.
Takeaway Facts:
⮚ 90 million small businesses use Facebook.
⮚ About 94% of marketers use Facebook for marketing campaigns globally.
⮚ Facebook hasFacebook's has about 7 million advertisers.
⮚ Facebook is the world's third most popular website after Google and YouTube.
⮚ As per the Social Marketing Forum, 41 percent of B2B marketers who use Facebook for marketing purposes acquire new clients through the platform. This makes it efficient for a B2B business.
Why is Twitter the most sought after for ideal clients?
As we know, Twitter has a comparatively lesser audience than Facebook. Twitter serves a different category of audience than what Facebook does. About 330 million active users exist on Twitter. The ad platform ads.twitter.com is exemplary for finding and connecting with your audience based on gender, keywords, interests, influences, etc.
Apart from the ad platform, you can also adopt Twitter's advanced search tool for identifying your audience. Once you have found the prospects, you can create a new Twitter list to increase your visibility. This will let you concentrate on the topics your audience is most interested in and how to engage them in a conversation.
To connect with your ideal client on Twitter, you must take up the following steps:
- Create a list of your prospects (based on location, age group, etc.)
- Find influencers or generally active users
- Look for like-minded users
- Segment your findings or results
- Approach wisely
Image Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228113
In the above mentioned image, you may witness bios of many Twitter users. Target keywords in the bio of relatable aspects to ensure you connect with your ideal clients. Based on keywords and location-oriented search, you can find people of a similar demographic location, thereby narrowing down the search for ideal clients.
Image Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228113
You can also witness the active users or frequently active ones. By finding these users and influencers, you can sketch a plan as to how to approach these users. You can also track their interests based on their tweets.
Image Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228113
Lastly, organize your scope and list based on priorities. Once you know your prospect, you can use Twitter’s built-in lists to classify the group of profiles. You can limit to up to 20 listslist with up to 500 contacts or users listed in each. This will help in expanding your scope but in a segmentedin segmented manner.
Some of the benefits of connecting with clients over Twitter are as follows:
- You can build traffic
- Social selling
- Build awareness of your products and services
- Boost lead generation
- Share web blog links through tweets
- Brand name build-up
Takeaway Facts:
⮚ Twitter's U.S. based users are expected to grow by 0.3 percent in 2020.
⮚ As per reports, Twitter ad engagement is up by 23 percent, which improved audience growth and click-through rate.
⮚ Twitter users generally spend about 26 percent more time with ads than other social media users.
⮚ Tweets followed by hashtags receive 100 percent more engagement than without it.
How can LinkedIn help in looking for ideal prospects?
According to reports, 92 percent of B2B marketers adopt LinkedIn in their digital marketing. While we know that LinkedIn has an advertising platform, however, the real element is in prospecting tools and making individual connections with the audience.
For instance, if you want to connect with an accountant professional in San Francisco. You can do so by searching for people with the same location and job position. It can also be narrowed down by searching those working with tech companies like Google, IBM, Apple, and more such brands.
Also, if you are looking for finding the suitable prospects or audience for your business, then you may have to go through stepwisestep-wise actions like:
- Create buyer’s sketch
- Choose to adopt advancedan advance keyword research (location, job position, etc.)
Given the image below for reference:
Image Source: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-find-and-connect-with-target-prospects-on-linkedin/
The quickest way to find ideal customers on LinkedIn is by adopting advancedadvance search. By simply clicking on the option of Advanced Link in the right side of the searchof search bar of LinkedIn.
- Look for similarities between your product and the prospects
- Do group search
Image Source: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-find-and-connect-with-target-prospects-on-linkedin/
The above reference image shows how you can seek LinkedIn users or your ideal prospects through group search. By simply looking for a place like city, state, country, institute, company, etc. you can aim to receive potential clients in abundance.
- Lastly, find and approach your prospect in unique manner
As per a study, 91 percent of executives claim that LinkedIn is the leading social network for professionally relevant content. LinkedIn has more than 660 million users, which makes it a massive platform to voice your brand.
Some of the significant benefits of using LinkedIn to connect with ideal clients are as follows:
- The best site for B2B corporate usage
- Share links of blogs, infographics, products, etc. through posts
- Faster site conversion
- Improve reputation
- Influencer marketing
- Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
Takeaway Facts:
About 61 million LinkedIn users are top-level influencers, while 40 million are in the decision-making position.
The majority of Fortune 500 companies prefer to use LinkedIn among social media platforms.
Based on reports, about 30 million companies are present on LinkedIn, which is great for B2B companies.
A B2B ad on LinkedIn has the potential to reach 12 percent of the world's population.
Concluding Note:
You can start by first identifying your ideal clients through surveys, questionnaires, research, etc. And later connect them through various social media marketing campaigns. By analyzing the data, you can match your content and the interests of your buyers. Once you align your method of marketing with your clients, the visibility rate will automatically spike.











