We all know how intelligent cats are. They would show us their intelligence more often if they weren’t so busy with their busy napping schedule. But, did you know that cats are good at marketing? It makes sense. Marketing is like a tiger chasing gazelles in the plains of Africa. All of the same skills apply. You have to be good at watching, timing, strategy, and pouncing. You can learn a lot from watching a cat.
Identifying your target audience
Cats identify their target audience by using their powers of observation. They sit and study the market behind a camouphlage of tall grass. This is exactly what you should do as a marketer. Just go to a place with some tall grass, and bring it into your office next to the computer to get you in the mood. For social media marketing, some people choose followers, and others choose sources of followers. If you choose your followers one by one, you will spend all day on a few. As a marketer, you need to follow tens of thousands of people on social media. So, find particular sources of followers that will give you the highest quality of follower. In cat terms, find the best large field(s) or expanse(s) where your lunch likes to graze. If one large field is not good on a particular day, you have researched other ones, so you have a constant supply of social media gazelles to prey upon.
Licking Your Paws
It is important to take a nap after some hunting. Reflect on the activities of the day, and give your other cat friends a kiss. Down time is very important when you are a cat!
Sitting & Watching
Identifying your target audience requires a lot of sitting and watching. My rule is that if you retweet from a particular account and those tweets are popular on your account, their followers will be compatible with your account too. You might have to experiment with a few dozen accounts to find the right accounts to feed off of. But, knowing which accounts to feed off of at a particular time is another skill you need to learn from your cat friends. Basically, you want to find the account with the slowest running gazelles if that makes sense. Easy pickings. You want to start finding members that comment on your favorite account or share posts. They will be the most active if you bring them over to your account. Active accounts have the juiciest meat too as you will soon find out. Once you have eaten all of the accounts that are active and the most relevant to you, go to some semi-relevant accounts and get some active people there. Even an active member from a completely general category might be more valuable to you than a dead-beat in your exact industry.
Sharing Your Catch
Remember, cats are very sharing, especially with their baby kitties. Sharing also takes lots of watching as well which is a skill that cats excel at. Some people just browse around and share stuff. This is not a good approach. You need to first decide what category of post you want to share . If you want to post ten shares or posts per day, you should decide how many of each category you should post. I like to post one or two industry specific posts per day. Then, I like to do semi-relevant posts. Finally, I do many posts of common interest to try to expand my fan base. If I decide to post a photo of a cat (which works very well) I’ll look at 40 cat photos, and pick the best one. I don’t like to be too choosy, otherwise there won’t be any choices for next time. But, I don’t like to pick the first cat I see either. I pick the best of 40, and I generally get 20-100 likes if I post it on a large group. The other guys who just pick the second or third cat they see average only a pawfull of clicks.
Napping
After a busy day doing cat-style marketing, it’s time for a nap. Nighty night!