Areeb Mirza explains how growing a social-media audience with the wrong geographic or market fit can harm a brand's ability to monetize. He describes a case of a 350k-follower Instagram food page whose followers were mostly South Asian, which blocked efforts to sell to North American customers or attract US brand sponsorships; he recommends planning audience targeting early and using ads carefully to bring desired demographics.
Chapters
There is a thing called growing your audience incorrectly. If you grow your audience on Instagram, Facebook, wherever your main platform is, if you grow it incorrectly, it will affect your brand more than if you were to start off fresh. Let me explain. So recently I had a page reach out to me with over 350,000 followers, a lot of followers. Engagement was pretty high. 500 likes, thousand likes, 50,000 views per reel. So that was pretty impressive numbers. They specifically came out to me, reaching out to me because they wanted to use their followers or use their brand on their page to kind of translate into the e commerce space. They want to sell products to, you know, the North American market in dollars, and they wanted to collab with brands, US brands, and get paid in dollars. But the page was like, it was about food and South Asian food, to be specific. But they had built up an audience of, you know, just, I would say 90%, 95% in the Asian market. It was so far gone onto the Asian market that whatever they post, whatever added onto their feed, the algorithms immediately recommended their content to that part of the world because that's where it performed the best. So if you don't direct your content towards the right people in the early stages, your page will struggle. So my only solution for them, and we were only talking through chats and I wasn't really planning on working on with them because we couldn't really help them. So there's no point working with someone you can't help. So my only advice for them was to try ads, but it was kind of like a hit or miss advice because ads is going to solve their target issue, but it's going to create an unbalance in their profile. Like if they keep wanting to do the organic strategy, ads might affect that. So I told them the whole terms of what to expect when running ads. It's beneficial, of course. You want North American people. You can run ads to only North American people and potentially get those sponsored brands. But sponsored brands don't look at other people's ads and then sponsor them. They look at something organic, something that's doing well, and then they reach out to the people potentially wanting to sponsor them. Or they could just reach out to brands themselves. But as you can see, it was a pretty big mess. So this could have all been avoided if they had a plan in mind, if they had a strategy in mind of what to do. Okay, this is my goal with this page. I want North American brands to work with me. I want to get paid in dollars because I live in North America and I Want to make sure the currency which I can actually profit. So creating a brand full of, you know, the wrong followers definitely didn't help their cause. Now of course they could have used some strategies where they could have made something more low ticket and sell something, something people could afford, but that isn't really an efficient method and you don't really get paid that much because people on the other side of the world are not really online buyers, as frequent as, you know, a North American market or even a European market. So just understanding the market and what your plan is with the page is just step one of what you need to do for your brand because taking a big swift later on can be very difficult. Know who you want to target, especially as a business. That's what we tell businesses all the time. Know who you want to target. A following of 5,000 people who are local to your city, who are your ideal customers are better than 100,000 followers of random people and only 5% of them are in your local city. 95% of them can't use your services because you are only based in one city. So those 5,000 people that are following you from ads or other sources, whenever you make a post, even if it gets low engagement, it's being seen by the right people. That's more powerful because you don't need sponsors, you don't need anything. You've already transformed your socials into a lead generating machine, into a trust building machine where, where prospect can come, where a potential client can come see your content, see what your service is about and go with you rather than growing a following of, you know, random people and taking the influencer route. If that's your goal, then of course you know, do what you have to do, create the trending content. But for a business specifically, do not create trending content just for views and likes. You can incorporate trending content within your niche, but do not create trending content just for the sake of views likes, because that is not going to result in anything. Just wanted to share this quick thought with you because if you do run a business and your services are, you know, limited to a certain region or a certain city, then you might need to change strategies right away. But even if you do a manual approach, running ads is completely beneficial and you are going to see a very big return if you build your social profiles the right way. That's all I have for you. Let me know what you guys think about this video. Leave a comment down below of what your thoughts are about this strategy and if you've been doing the same thing or not. And yeah, I'll see you next week.
