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How To Hit The Target With Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media is big business. That’s been clear for a long time. When 71% of people who have a positive experience with a brand on social media go on to recommend it to others, that’s not an avenue any sensible company can overlook. And it’s particularly important for ecommerce, because it doesn’t take much effort to quickly tap on a convenient link. Marketing an online store through social media is technologically taking the path of least resistance.

But it’s tough to do well, especially if you’re targeting a niche. Broad marketing is like spouting sozzled comedy stylings at a bar; if it’s bad, no big deal. Niche marketing is more like going up on stage at an elite open-mic night— you need to bring your A-game or you’re going to bomb.

So you need to get a pretty damn good plan ready if you want to get established through a social media niche to get your profits rising. Here’s how to nail your niche marketing strategy:

 

Research and produce targeted content

OK, sure, exhaustive keyword research isn’t the most entertaining thing in the world—and the word exhaustive probably didn’t help there—but it is incredibly effective when you’re looking to meet (or exceed) the expectations of your target audience.

If you form a comprehensive list of relevant terms and questions through tools like KeywordTool and Ubersuggest, you’ll have a rich well of ideas and concepts to draw from when planning longer-form social media content.

For instance, if you sell something quite niche like novelty gloves, and find that a surprising number of people search for “novelty gloves to wear at masquerade parties” (I assume they don’t, but you’re welcome to check), you can write a piece called The Best Novelty Gloves to Wear at Masquerade Parties and promote it through social media.

 

If you form a comprehensive list of relevant terms and questions through tools like KeywordTool and Ubersuggest, you’ll have a rich well of ideas and concepts to draw from when planning longer-form social media content.

What a strange world I’ve accidentally entered. Source here.

 

After all, there’s no point in producing content that won’t interest the people you’re trying to reach, or is so generic that they won’t really notice it because they’ll have already read twelve articles about the same thing— and if you can create something of really high quality, it may even come to be seen as a default recommendation in that community, ultimately lending you a lot of authority and pushing a great deal of traffic in your direction.

Your research will also help you avoid the sense of “How do you do, fellow kids?” awkwardness that results when companies try to sell things to demographics they don’t fully understand. There’s a decent chance you already feel comfortable speaking the local dialect (as it were), but there’s never any harm in checking.

 

Engage with primary influencers

In any given niche, there will be an assortment of people who have considerably more sway on social media than anyone else, and it’s a matter of some urgency that you figure out who they are, what they want, where their related interests lie, whom they know, and other such factors.

It may technically be possible to work up from nothing to become an effective social media force purely through using targeted ads and waiting for your best content to reach the right eyes through happenstance and hashtags, but it’s hardly advisable.

 

Find the top dogs in the community and reach out to them, being sure to put your best foot forward.

JunkBanter is my go-to place for (often sponsored) confectionery news. 

 

Instead, find the top dogs in the community and reach out to them, being sure to put your best foot forward. If you can establish some kind of relationship with them, you can get them to sample your products and talk about you on a regular basis, giving you a ton of relevant and credible exposure without breaking the bank.

You can also use those connections to engage in conversations with people who might be interested in your products, showing them that the people behind your brand are personable, human, and interested in learning more about their potential customers.

Carefully allocate your resources

You can’t push out decent posts and content links every minute of every day, and even if you could, you definitely wouldn’t want to, because you’d rocket straight past the point of diminishing returns into the hellish realm of counterproductivity.

So you need to devise a schedule. Figure out when you’re going to post, and on what topics, and on which platforms, and using which hashtags, and tagging which people. You should factor in the drip-feed of mentioning your products on a regular basis, but also account for the occasional pieces of post-only-when-completely-ready tentpole content.

And that means thinking about things like seasonal posts, and being incredibly granular with your sponsored posts and influencer exchanges. It’s the force of the impact that you’re interested in, not the number of punches. Pick your moment and aim to land a knockout.

Remember: you’re not trying to reach everyone, so you don’t need to worry so much about getting tons of followers and ‘going viral’ in a general sense. You’re best served keeping things very focused and specific, and putting the bulk of your effort towards the stuff that strikes at the very core of what you’re trying to achieve.

Put a stamp on your visuals

Visuals are really, really, really important in social media feeds. All the text looks the same and quickly blurs together, even at a relatively-sedate scrolling pace. It’s the visuals that set particular posts apart, be they images, animations, or videos.

As such, you should invest a lot of time and effort into high-quality imagery, and try to find an approach that suits you and your company ethos. If you sell environmentally-friendly soaps, take your own photos to reflect that DIY all-the-charm-of-home mentality. If you sell luxury cars, get a professional photographer in and task them with achieving maximum gloss. If you mess this up, you’ll give a really odd impression of what your business is all about (so don’t mess it up!).

If you sell luxury cars, get a professional photographer in and task them with achieving maximum gloss.

If you’re in an upmarket niche, you go upmarket with your images.

That isn’t to say that you can’t use existing image resources at all, because you definitely can; you just need to be a little smarter about it. If you sell fitness products, try creating simple images for your fitness posts by taking your favourite free fitness photos then adding some text, or reframing them, or tweaking the colouring— just finding some way of consistently customising them in a clearly-recognisable manner (tools like Stencil are great for this).

Essentially, the objective is to leave some kind of signature touch on all of your visuals. That way, when people see one of your images, they won’t just mentally lump it in with all the other generic shots that litter their feed; they’ll see something that reminds them of you in particular. That’s the kind of recognition plenty of businesses would kill for (possibly literally).


Mastering a niche is all about understanding the tiniest details of the topics and the audience you’re approaching. When you delve into social media, follow these steps to give yourself the best possible chance of resonating with your prospective customers.

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Victoria Greene is an ecommerce marketing expert and freelance writer who quite enjoys cringeworthy social media advertising. You can read more of her work at her blog Victoria Ecommerce.

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