There’s an old Afghan proverb that says if you think you are leading and no one is following you, then you are only taking a walk. The great news for all of us who are involved in marketing is that with the new media, tracking followers is a pretty easy thing to do. Just open your social media site and it will tell you how many followers you have. But are followers really the "following” you are after? In other words, are they the right people to gain more sales? It is worth taking a closer look over your shoulder.

To whom are you marketing?

There are typically three levels of people that you need to focus your marketing efforts on. The first is your customers. They have purchased something from you in the past. If they were pleased with your product or service, found the price to be fair, received the delivery of the product/service in a timely manner, and were treated well by your employees, they are likely candidates to purchase from you again. This is the group that identifies with you. They are also the most easily identifiable group when it comes to marketing. Get them on your mailing list, ask them to like your social media, advertise your specials to them. Retaining a customer is much easier than seeking out new ones. Customers are the first group.

The second group are your prospects. They may look very similar to your current customers in terms of demographics like age, marital status, industry, etc. They just haven’t purchased anything from you yet. Your marketing efforts will be based on what has worked with your current customers, enticing them to give you a try. They are also a group you want following you.

The third group is the most overlooked of the three, but in many cases are most important. They will never purchase anything from you, but they are the influencers of opinion. Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are making child safety seats that can be easily locked into an automobile seat, a stroller, and a high chair for feeding the baby. It has a three-in-one function and it can be locked in place or released with a simple thumb button. Your main target market would be parents of infants (primarily mothers), with a secondary market of grandparents of the same children. Who would be the influencers of the target market? That would include consumer protection groups, like Consumer Reports. It would also include pediatric doctors. It would also include governmental agencies like the National Highway Safety Transportation Administration. What if the NHSTA came out with a report that said that your child safety seat came unhitched when there was a crash of over 30 mph? No one would purchase anything from you in that case. You need to market to these groups to convince them your child seat is safe. Getting an endorsement from them would be golden. Beyond consumer protection groups, there are other influencers. The biggest may be the child. What if your child cries because the leg restraints squeezes too hard on the baby? What would happen to your following in your target market when the parents of the crying baby took to your social media site to tell the horrors of your product? This may call for some testing of your product with real babies to make sure the comfort is as good as the safety of the seat.

What do your analytics tell you?

So we have three groups to which we are marketing: customer, prospects and influencers. Here is where you need to pay close attention to your analytics. Are there specific mediums that one or more of these groups gravitate to when you are marketing to them? For instance, in parsing through the statistics trailing behind a recent blog post we wrote for a client, we found that about 10 % of their customers responded when a link to the post was sent to them via an e-blast. However, twice as many people in their influencers group responded to the e-blast. The e-blast was a good medium for reaching their customers and a much better medium for marketing to the influencers.

We posted a link to the same blog on LinkedIn. In this case, very few customers responded to the post with any kind of engagement (like, share, comment, click). Only 2% engaged, although it had well over 1,000 impressions in 72 hours. When we checked the demographics on the followers of the LinkedIn page, we found that the vast majority were entry-level employees of companies – not the group we were trying to sell. We needed senior managers, vice presidents, c-level decision makers.

Here is where we decided to make a shift. Was there something the entry-level employee could give us in terms of influence? We drilled down a bit further and found that these entry-level employees were working in an industry that was highly influential to the customers of our client. If you take a long view of marketing, entry-level employees eventually become senior management. So we may be marketing to them for their direct influence years down the road. But there is a more immediate marketing strategy at work with social media, like LinkedIn. Many of the barriers between employee levels are knocked down on social media. An engaged entry-level employee most likely will have connections to their senior managers on LinkedIn. If they like your post, it will be seen by all of their connections, which means you could get to the senior manager through the entry-level employee. We made a shift. We started listing the new hires of our client. We also listed the promotions that occurred when entry-level employees moved up. Guess what happened? The followers on LinkedIn began to like, share, comment and click on these posts. What seemed to be a function of human resources became a marketing ploy to get to the influencers.

How closely have you looked at the followers of your new media marketing? Are you marketing to customers, prospects and influencers? Getting to the bottom of your analytical statistics can help you make a bigger impact on your target market.