Effective marketing is about being proactive, watching for promotional opportunities with a targeted audience to which you can promote your services. Let’s face it; no one will come to you unless you make your presence known. Yet, many of us set up social media accounts such as Twitter and then forget to build up a following to drive potential customers to our websites, online profiles or company pages. Online channels, such as Twitter, tend to be left once built to take a life of their own, somewhere we launch updates or snippets of news without any strategic objective.
Each online medium differs in its features and how you can use them to prospect, gain followers, drive engagement and sales. Using a mix of social media channels to gain a greater audience is smart. But relying on organic growth to build up your prospects isn’t.
Here are six simple, highly effective approaches to quickly building your target audience up on X (formerly known as Twitter). Doing this quickly is essential when working as a freelance nutritionist.
1. Prospecting followers
Most freelance nutritionists use X. In fact, over one billion people use X each month. So potentially, that’s 1 billion customers! Wait – no, it isn’t! Not all the people on X want a freelance nutritionist; not all require weight loss, company nutrition talks, one-to-one consultations, plant-based recipes …. or whatever nutrition services or products you intend to offer.
The first rule to building up your audience is to find those most likely to want your services. Marketers call this prospecting for customers or sales prospecting. Sales prospecting through X can be very effective. It comes down to who you follow and who follows you. You can do this by targeting your most likely customers, following them and waiting for them to follow you back. It may be some time for many to reciprocate, as although you’ve identified them as potential customers, they may not feel the immediate need for the services of a freelance nutritionist. But if you target well, they will eventually follow.
2. Use keywords to fish
Finding customers to follow and follow you in return can be somewhat like finding a needle in a haystack. So, use the search box on X to generate more substantial leads. Be careful not to use the words that define your service, as you will end up with people offering the same service as yourself. Whether they are your colleagues, other fellow nutritionists or charities providing free advice, we still call them competitors, and they will be the last people you need to follow you. For example, don’t type ‘recipe analysis’ but use keywords that your prospects might be using or define your target market, e.g. hotels and restaurants. It’s rather like fishing with different kinds of bait—the more reliable the bait (or the more relevant the keyword) the better the catch.
3. Go where the fish are
To increase the prospect numbers, try going where they go. For example, if your services were for menu analysis, hotels and restaurants are most likely to be members of a hospitality trade association. So, your keywords could be Hospitality Association. Unless you’re going global, you will want to narrow the location down. So, if you use Hospitality Association UK; you will find @UKHospitality, which has 30.7K followers and define its association as “Hospitality is the single voice for hospitality, seeking to unlock the industry’s full potential.” Those who follow @UKHospitality will be mainly hotels, restaurants and catering companies. Otherwise known as a valuable target audience for menu analysis.
4. Pick and sort
When you start to look through the list of a chosen target audience, e.g. followers of @UKHospitality, you will see those who might become prospective clients. However, you will need to pick those most likely to need your menu analysis service first. This is called your primary audience. One way of doing this is to look for keywords such as chef, menu etc
As soon as they start to follow back, you can then use the X lists (mark it as private) to sort the followers according to your specific criteria, e.g. caterers, hotels, restaurants, chefs etc. Marketers call this segmentation. This will allow you to send a particular communication to a target audience later. Effective marketing communications is about targeting the message to the right target audience.
5. Use the hashtags
You can also use hashtags to search for prospective followers. Once you have a growing target audience following you, you can consider refining your audience more by using popular hashtags that your audience might be using.
Every time you post something on X and use that same hashtag to reach your specified audience, it will increase the chances of you being followed back. You can also claim a particular hashtag as yours by putting it on your profile to increase the number of times you come up in a search.
6. Real-time communications
Real-time communications are another approach to increasing your followers. Marketers use ‘newsjacking’ to help build brand awareness and relevance. Simply put, it is a combination of ‘news’ and ‘hijacking’ or using the news agenda to help get your name/brand mentioned so that you are at the forefront of a specific event. For example, calories on menus for restaurants with more than 250 staff became a legal requirement on 6 April 2022 in the UK, yet only 8% of those using #caoloriesonmenu were Registered Nutritionists. A lost opportunity for freelance nutritionists to gain a following interested in undertaking menu analysis services.
Newsjacking a news story allows your name/brand to be at the forefront of information on a specific event. It can grow your reputation and followers. But remember, the golden rule of newsjacking is to keep it relevant and not force your name or brand into something that doesn’t fit.
Lastly, you will need to decide how often to work on building your target audience. We suggest you undertake this little but very regularly. For example, you could set aside 30 minutes every morning searching following, assigning to a list and high jacking the news as you drink your morning cuppa. Alternatively, do this when enroute using your mobile phone or just settling down for your relaxation in the evening.
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