When you’re focusing on social media marketing, you might think that the broadcasting is the whole point – after all, you want to get your message out to the greatest number of people, right?
Not necessarily, or at least not in the sense of indiscriminately telling everyone everything all the time. It’s much more effective to target the certain groups of people with the message that will work best for them. The trick, of course, is knowing how to do that, and the Circles system on Google+ is a great way to filter outgoing content so that it reaches the right audience at the right time.
For most people working on their marketing strategy, keeping an eye on consumer behavior is one of the basic ways to monitor where things are heading next. With Google+ Circles, you can break that down further into groups of consumers, and measure each group separately to find out what your younger audience is doing, what your female audience is doing, or any number of other filters you might wish to create. This allows you to tailor messages to each of these groups in ways that may not appeal to the other group, without driving anyone away.
Of course, effective Circle setup is the all-important first step, and is something you should consider carefully right from the time you start building your Google+ presence. It’s not good enough just to dump all your customers in a Circle called “Customers” – you need to be vigilant and consistent about what you want to measure, and how you want to partition. You might choose to group people by age, gender, line of work, hobbies – any label that might be useful in your marketing efforts.
Once you have your Circles set up how you want them, you can easily monitor responses to the content you put out. Once you see how each group responds (or doesn’t respond), this will help you tailor future content accordingly. It may also help you see how you can improve the way you send messages to a certain group. You’ll also start to see trends with in your Circles in terms of who is an influencer and which users can help boost the signal for important updates you send out.
Google+ is still relatively new, and there are increasing numbers of tools that are surfacing to help with analytics and Circle management. Using these in conjunction with carefully arranged Circles, you will start to be able to see patterns emerging that will help you focus your marketing efforts in the right direction.
