Planning for 2023 - Researching Promotional Placements and Opportunities

Looking to get more attention for your business in 2023?

Over the first few weeks of the year, we’re publishing a series of tips and notes on how to maximize your social media and digital marketing efforts, including pointers on new tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, and how these evolving apps can assist in your content planning process.

We’ve already covered the following elements:

So, with knowledge of the key topics, approaches and benchmarks currently at play in your sector, you now have a good understanding of the likely direction that your digital marketing approach is headed.

But that still won’t get you attention - for that, you need to understand where your target audience is looking, and how to get your brand messages in front of them, at the right place and time.

Your competitor research will provide some valuable pointers on this - if your key competition is seeing good engagement on Instagram, that’s a pretty good indicator that you should be looking at IG too.

But in order to get maximum attention, you need to consider which publications your audience is reading, what influencers they follow, and what types of content approaches resonate best.

Meeting your audience where they’re engaging

So on the first point - what publications is your audience reading. There are few different ways to determine this, and you likely already have some idea of the top publications or sites that your target market is engaging with.

If you can get mentioned in these publications, that’s an immediate win, as your brand will be presented where they’re looking - which is a key tenet of Google Ads and display as placement.

Paid promotion is one way to go, but you may also be able to get into these publications via guest posting, or get mentioned by a relevant influencer, or in relevant Facebook groups, Reddit communities, etc.

One way of researching the most influential people and publications for a given topic is to use Followerwonk’s audience comparison tool, which enables you to find follows in common among Twitter profiles.

As you can see here, using this tool, you can enter in three different profiles and get a display of who all three follow (FYI - Ryan Seacrest is the only one followed by all three).

Go through the audience listings of your competitors, compare who those users all follow in common, and you’ll get a fair idea of the most influential Twitter profiles in your sector, which should then be a target for your outreach.

Of course, Twitter is not the most popular social platform, and sees nowhere the usage of Facebook or TikTok. As such, you may think that this insight is less valuable, but the most passionate and active social media users are generally also connected via Twitter, to ensure that they keep up to date with the latest.

That’s why people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump view Twitter as so important, because even though it has far fewer users, Twitter remains the source of many major news stories and trends. Influential users take info from Twitter, then redistribute it to other platforms - and as such, it just may be that reaching these users plays a key role in maximizing brand awareness in your niche.

Another tool that can come in handy here is BuzzSumo, which can highlight all the most relevant Twitter, YouTube and TikTok profiles on a given subject.

Understanding who the most influential voices are in your niche can guide you towards the key people for influencer marketing partnerships. Make a list of the top voices, take the time to look through their content, then reach out to them with free samples, proposals or other offers to partner up on awareness campaigns.

There’s a range of key tips for reaching out to influencers (some valuable pointers here), and if you can get it right, and match up the right influencers who can actually connect you through to your target market, it’s definitely worth investing the time and effort into such partnerships to further your marketing opportunities.

For local businesses, it may also be worth examining local publications, and understanding their key areas of focus.

For this analysis, I manually tagged the 100 most shared social media articles from a publication by topic (extracted via BuzzSumo), then mapped the key areas of focus in this chart.

That provides some additional perspective on what their audience is most interested in, which may help in your assessment of potential ad placements, story pitches, and topical angles to appeal to this specific group.

There are also creator marketplace listings for Facebook, IG and TikTok (in selected markets), which enable you to find influencers by topic, and get an idea of their work and interests, while you can also use Pinterest’s Trends tool to assess the relative popularity of any topic, and related ideas.

You can also search for topic-rated Facebook Groups, which you can join to monitor key discussion trends.

There are also opportunities for promotional approaches within FB groups, but I would recommend against pushing promotions within direct group chats. There may be ways to partner with admins on promotions or giveaways, or even ads, if they’re running group placements. But your primary goal here, as it should be with relative Reddit communities, is to listen and learn what people are interested in, and what they’re looking for, which can then inform your other promotional pushes.

Run through the various options and tools, and in the end, you’ll have a listing of potential publications and influencers that you can reach out to, or target with paid campaigns, to connect with the right people, in order to raise awareness of your brand.

Follow the key profiles on Twitter, reach out to key influencers, and join relevant Facebook groups to help boost your understanding of what people are looking for, and you can then start to formulate a more effective outreach process, aligned more specifically to your target market.