What market research is showing me as I build a social media course

Social media marketing is a hot topic because it's indisputably the #1 marketing channel for building brand awareness, product discovery and purchasing. According to Smart Insights 94.2% of internet users have social media identities today! Basically, social media presents a huge opportunity for marketers and advertisers. Nowadays, it's all about video. According to ​HubSpot​, marketers report that video-centric social media platforms are the most effective and offer the best ROI:

Why am I telling you this?

I'm building out a course that's based on my experience as a social media manager + questions I often get from people regarding social media content creation and strategy. But I'm not just winging this. I'm building it off of what people want by doing market research and I’m pulling back the curtain on each step in the process. Over these next few weeks, I am evaluating conversations with clients + prospects, search trends, and audience polls!

• ​My FAQ’s page​ shows real questions I've gotten from people. There seems to be a resonating theme: most people need help with reels. Creativity is daunting to them. And they want to know how to measure success with content.

• My top-performing social media posts from the past year tell me people are looking for guidance on creating engaging content:

  📱​Wondering what to post? Show and tell...​

  📱​Watch and observe before building your offer​

  📱​Create your own content pillars​

  📱​Build engagement with evergreen content

• I'm using ​Google Trends​, a tool that analyzes what's trending across Google and YouTube. It pulls search data based on a keyword to show how it's trended over the past hour, all the way through the past decade! If a topic is declining in popularity, that's a sign to question whether there will be a demand for it in the future.

Good news—

"Social Media Marketing" has remained on a steady incline over the past 5 years. 🎉

• ​Answer the Public​ is a similar tool that shows the most-searched questions as it relates to a keyword.

Regarding social media marketing, the most in-demand queries are:

1. What are social media marketing strategies?

2. Can social media marketing really help my business?

3. How does social media marketing work?

4. What do social media marketing agencies do?

5. Where to learn social media marketing

6. Which social media channel is dedicated to videos?

7. Why is social media marketing effective?

• Local (to Greenville, SC) Facebook groups show a lot of "ISO: social media manager" posts! The pain points are clear and simple: people don't have time to post consistently and they want to create compelling content. I took these screenshots from “Greenville Young Professionals”, a popular networking group for many people:

𝐍𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐘𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩

I want to know about your biggest challenges as a business owner and what you want to learn. I’m conducting surveys to get answers to questions like:

• What do you know about social media?

• What do you wish you knew about social media?

• When you first started your business what do you wish you’d learned?

• What have you learned since then and have found most helpful?

• Would you take a course on social media?

Send me a message to take part in a survey and get added to my list of beta testers who will get the course first at a discount in exchange for feedback!