Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace

When we offer services, one way to connect with our audience is through social media. The challenge is that while we want to reach a large number of people, there are important factors to consider. But how can you truly stand out in the crowded social media landscape? In this episode, I have Wendy Pace, Founder and Owner of PACE Setting Media. We talk about the importance of making content for a specific audience, and marketing strategies for businesses. We also discuss the limitations of algorithmic content creation and how social media algorithms work for content visibility. Learn how to stand out online! --- Listen to the podcast here: Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a broader category of getting noticed. You produce a product, you produce a service, you produce an offering, even wanting to, say, get people together for some sort of a social endeavor. No matter what you’re trying to do, you have to find some way of getting noticed, and as you’re probably well aware of, over the last half a century and particularly even the last 20 years, the landscape of getting noticed has changed quite a bit, there’s a very different way of getting noticed now than it was during, say, the middle of the 20th century. There’s a lot of stuff that involves digital marketing and content creation that I’m here to talk with my guest today, Wendy Pace, the founder and owner of Pace Setting Media, about this endeavor and what getting noticed in the 21st century really looks like. --- Wendy, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Starting on the topic of getting noticed and how much that has changed, what’s the number one thing that someone needs to think about, let’s say someone just finished building their product or finished outlining their service, outlining their offering, what’s the number one thing someone should be thinking on right now as far as getting noticed? Okay, so they’ve developed a product or a service, they need to be thinking about who is this for? What does my audience look like and where is my audience at? A lot of people just throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks and that’s not exactly the way it works in social media.Share on X If you’ve noticed or paid any attention to your social media feeds, your view of the world has gotten narrower and narrower because of the algorithms. So you really have to have a keen understanding of who your audience is so that you can tell Facebook, you can tell Google, you can tell them, “This is my audience,” and you can get some of that knowing what your hashtag should be, knowing what the lifestyle of your audience is, there are other ways of getting around what Facebook used to, and back in the day, when I started, you could pick your household, right? You’d be like, “I want two-income, I want four kids, I want the dog, I want the cat, I want the white picket fence. I want it in this zip code,” and you could really kind of hand pick who got to see your stuff. Now, you have to be a lot more creative. You need to think about, okay, say it’s a car decaling or car mats, you make custom car mats. Well, you need to think about who’s that lifestyle? Who’s going to be that car person? What are the things they’re going to be interested in? What are the most common job titles they might have? Because you can’t pick all of them. And then what’s the income around base, what kind of generalized income would you be in? And that is where your key audience members are. So, first and foremost, figure out who you’re selling this service to, what do they do, what does their life look like, so that you can pick the right pain points to get into their feeds. And while we’re talking about who your audience is, who you’re selling to, I think some people who are more familiar with the topic of, say, market segmentation may have heard the concept of, say, demographics versus psychographics, and it seems like demographics, when I think about that, I think about the old way, I think about TV ratings, it’s like the 18 to 34 or whichever demographic, whereas, of course, psychographics, for those not familiar, goes a lot deeper into a lot of the stuff that you’re saying, about, okay, even where does this person like to shop? Is this person tend to be Saturday morning at 9 a.m., is your target group still sleeping off last night’s drinking binge or is your target audience at a farmer’s market trying to get a head start on building some project or something like that. So is demographics, your standard race, age, gender, income level, some of those more standard ones, completely out the window now or does it need to more be supplemented by the psychograph? They go hand in hand. Not only do you have to know the age range and income and ethnicity and the socioeconomic path that that person’s on. They’ve tried to strip away a lot of that demographic, that specific demographic. You have to think about, culturally, what does that person do? So, back to the car thing, are they a NASCAR person? Not only are they NASCAR, are they maybe college football? Or maybe they’re in the bootleg liquors or they like moonshine, whatever, and that’s very stereotypical, but then, from there, you can go out. Are they high-end vehicles? In the luxury lifestyle? Are these the same people who are at the golf course? Are these the same people who are taking luxury trips? There are those kind of little nitpicky things and details about a person’s activities that are going to help you get your product in front of them. And when people are thinking through this, because this is not something you do in, say, 10 minutes of just being like, “Oh, of course, it’s for them,” it takes some more in-depth thoughts, what are the biggest mistakes you think people make when they’re looking at who they’re selling to, when they’re trying to figure out like who is that person that I’m really trying to get noticed by? A lot of times, they’re not open to the fact that it might not be the person they think it is. Interesting. So they get a little short sighted. They’re like, “No, it’s absolutely – this is my person,” and it’s like, well, how do you know that? If you don’t have a brick and mortar and you’re working online, you don’t know who’s walking through your store door, so you have to get a really good CRM because you want to start analyzing that data as soon as it’s coming in. Then the other thing they need to understand is when Facebook does this, I won’t say well but they do this, they offer a 2 percent differential on your audience so if you find that you have a successful audience where you’re getting engagement on that first ad, it’s starting to get some traction, you can ask Facebook, “Can you do a 2 percent differential on this?” and it’s going to skew it just slightly and then you might be grabbing a few more that you didn’t even know were in your pool. You had no idea they were fishing in your pond. So, let’s say someone gets their report on who’s coming through their door and it turns out to be something different than what you had at first imagined, is this more likely to be because you had an idea for a target audience and it turns out to be a little bit different or because you did something, say, incorrect or different than what you should have done in your SEO, in your presentation, in your content creation? It could be both of those things and here’s why. Have you ever typed in something into Google incorrectly but it gave you what you wanted? So, it takes into consideration the way people tend to misspell work. Same thing with the algorithms. They’re going to take into consideration that this was the lane you chose and it’s just going to go like that, just slightly go, “Hmm, we’re gonna go pick a few of these others,” and, all of a sudden, you start seeing traction. What do you have to do when you see that traction is dive into that audience. So you get your analytic report from Facebook, you get your analytic report from Instagram, and you look at all of these things and it’s like, oh, okay, for example, I have a country artist that I’m helping promote. He thought he was going to knock it out of the park with young 20-something guys who like country music and tweens. He thought, “That’s my –” His demographic is actually Gen X female and he was like, “What?” I was like, “Yeah, you’re trending really, really high with the 45-year-olds to 50-something-year-olds, female, and this is your niche, dude,” and he was like, “Okay.” So, when we started creating his content, he was like, “This feels like a 90s video,” I said, “But think about who your audience is.” So now we had to start changing the way his perception of his product, which is himself and his music, and going, “Okay.” I was like, “But this is a good demographic for you, because they have money, so they have money to spend and come to your concert. So you have to think about that that way.” That’s interesting, because one of the things I wonder is, as people discover, say, a completely different group of people, and you start changing your content, how do you force this balance between changing my content to attract the audience that I’m attracting, to cater to my audience, versus people who can end up feeling like they’ve started to do something that’s running contrary to their initial vision? How do you kind of maintain that initial vision, like I’ve wanted to do this and I don’t want to compromise that while also kind of tweaking it and tailoring it to whatever the audience turns out to be in situations like this? I think a lot of us go into business with an idea of exactly how it’s going to go, and one of the things you have to understand, as an entrepreneur,...