For a social media marketer, understanding your target audience is the important thing. A defined target audience is a need so that you can design your social media strategy around it.
Your social media target audience can be defined as a particular group of people, who are most likely to share common interests in your content. You reach these people via your content, services, or products. These people can be in the same region, age, or have similar characteristics or behaviors. With the most perfect or rather specific target, you can make a good sell. It must be noted that your products’ sale is highly dependant on your target. That is how you reach your potential customers.
How to find your social media target audience?
Finding your social media target audience is not that difficult. The research is all about narrowing down your focus to expand your reach.
Here’s what you need to do:
Study and analyze data on your existing customers and social media audience
The research begins at a closed quarter, i.e., the people who already buy from you or follow you. The already engaging people are the most important to start with. The data to consider are:
Age – as per your product or content demands,
Location – where you want to create the buzz,
Language – the audience’s native language is important to sell,
Spending patterns – what your audience believes in for a particular
Product,
Interest – things that your audience takes an interest to proceed with,
Challenges – any shortcomings in the way of your audience that can be overcome by your product,
and
State of life – like teens, students, parents, etc.
If you are a B2B company, you might also want to consider:
The size of businesses and the managers responsible for buying decisions.
You can rely on social media analytics for a lot of information. Your own data can also help extract useful details. The overall research might not tell the accurate target, but an estimation can be made of it. There are various services that help you analyze your audience as well.
Also Read: How To Start A Blog? A Complete Guide
Use social listening to find more about your brand
Social listening is the most fundamental way to tap conversations about your business, your industry, and your products. This can be done by monitoring relevant keywords and hashtags. It can tell you what exact buzz is going about you even if you are not tagged. When you respond to this, you make a step towards knowing your audience. With social listening, you can do a lot. You can understand your audience and put in place similar stuff in your content. This will extend your reach to more customers.
Research which social channels your audience uses
Once you get to know your audience, you have to find more about them. You need to figure out which are the channels your audience is available at. You can use tools like Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch, Keyhole.co, Google analytics, etc.
You can track in which platform, your posts are doing well. This pattern will say where your audience is most active.
Look out for the competition
It is quite possible that your target audience might be your competitor’s target as well. So, you need to check out what effort they are putting to keep the audience engaged. You need to track things down and plan your strategy accordingly. You can use tools like Buzzsumo or search streams. Such tools help you find related information about your genre and your competitors. These tools can also help with your content strategy.
Understand your target audience’ expectations and preferences from your social channels
You need to draw lines and connect dots between your product or service, and your audience’s requirements. You need to find out what impact your product or content has on the audience and what benefits it can provide. Understanding such points is required as you will have to frame your content around the same. This will help you reach out to the audience in a more convincing way.
How to get to your target audience on social media
Considering all the above points, along with your audiences’ purchasing barriers,
buying a journey or pattern, or interests can help you a lot to make the sell.
Well, keeping all this aside, once you have figured your target audience, it is time to reach them.
You might consider the following:
Lookalike audiences and ad targeting
This is a simple and easy way to reach out to the audience. The lookalike audience is based on characteristics and behaviors similar to people who already are somehow linked with your brand. You can use precise ad targeting which is available on various platforms. You can define the audience as per your research. There might be a chance that your target audience varies. Then you may consider showing relevant ads to a particular audience at a time and not as a whole.
Because it is all about appealing. You can analyze your content as an audience and move forward.
A/B test paid and organic content to maximize reach
A/B testing is a real-time test based on a small audience and their response to a particular product or campaign. Using this technique you can tweak your content accordingly. The organic growth can be achieved by relevantly working on content, caption, image, post types of the timing of posts.
Revisit your audience research as required
With the above-mentioned technique, you may get more price information. This means you should keep track of your research regularly so that you can build your content around it. You always have to reach the right set of people for your brand to grow.
The key points discussed to find your social media target audience is no rocket science. A little patience and the use of the right tools for the research will be enough. Also, once you figure out the audience, you can confidently work on creating or devising your content around their needs and interests. This practice will help you make the sale. And there you will be, a successful brand that understands the customer’s needs and acts effectively.
