Part 1: Target Audiences: Social Media Strategy for Finserv
Executive Summary: While a Business Strategy for Finance starts with the organisation’s purpose and goals, a social media strategy MUST start with the customer/client/stakeholder target audience. If you don’t start with how the platforms work, you will end up in verticals (products/services) instead of horizontals (target audience) and the whole thing gets very messy, very fast. Let’s look at psychographics, story types, and custom/lookalike/preferred audiences for financial services!
Executive Summary: While a Business Strategy for Finance starts with the organisation’s purpose and goals, a social media strategy MUST start with the customer/client/stakeholder target audience. If you don’t start with how the platforms work, you will end up in verticals (products/services) instead of horizontals (target audience) and the whole thing gets very messy, very fast. Let’s look at psychographics, story types, and custom/lookalike/preferred audiences for financial services!
In this multipart series of videos and tutorials (about an hour all up, so be prepared!) we write a social media STRATEGY for Financial Services. Part 1 is targeting audiences. Understanding how the algorithms use psychographics, looking at custom audiences vs lookalike audiences and why we ALWAYS start with the Audience in a social media Strategy.
Key Points of a Target Audience for Financial Services
Always start with Story Types – 2 types visual/images/video vs text/articles/links. If your audience are financial consultants or accountants, writers/authors/wordsmiths or Academic/Researchers, they are oft TEXT storytypes. Do not try to inflict images or videos on them! For every other audience, they are probably VISUAL. Data Research teams state categorically that they show LESS images/videos in the newsfeed of text story types so be careful!
The Algorithm splits audiences up into Preferred audiences (similar to Target Audiences, see below) called Psychographics: Don’t say “retirees” as that’s too broad for financial products and services. Instead, investigate Provincial Wealth (tree change), Prudent Nostalgia (coupon, pension day) Golden Days (ex Directors), Aging Comfortably (Smart Townies), Retirepreneur (subset of Prudent Nostalgia OR Golden Days) and so on.
There are 5 MAIN Audiences for the algorithm: Preferred Audience (channel), Target Audience (article), Custom Audience (website visitors, email newsletter subs), Saved Audience (custom audience), Lookalike Audience (unknown audience). If you are creating your own Saved Audience, recognise that the algorithm will tweak it for up to 2 weeks. Which audience are you working with for your financial services marketing?
NEXT: we look at what platforms financial services should be on (when and why), mapping content to the target audiences, as well as Leaders and Key Influencers in Financial Services.