All successful brands on social media know their target audience and cater to them. You might dream that you can have a social media profile that everyone enjoys, but if you try to appeal to everyone, in the end, you’ll appeal to no one.
Here are some tips to help you learn about audience targeting and how to effectively appeal to them.
Use Your Analytics
You can use your analytics to help you understand what sort of audience you already have on social media. On Instagram, you can click on the insights button on your profile and it will give you lots of information such as the percentage of followers from different cities and countries, the age groups your followers fall into, and even the percentage of which are male and female.
This is all knowledge that you can use to better understand who your audience is. With that, you’ll better understand what kind of content you should be posting to target more potential followers. If 18-24-year-old women tend to be the main portion of your audience, then you know that your business is one that appeals to them and therefore you want to post content that appeals to more women of their age.
Remember, you can only access these analytics on Instagram if you are a business account. If you’re not already, it’s easy to switch over. Just know, your analytics will only show information from the day you switched over and beyond.
Ask Yourself Questions About Your Target Audience
With or without analytics, it’s important to ask yourself what you’re looking for in a customer/follower. Your analytics might give you a general idea of your audience, but to gain more long-term fans and customers you need to have a more specific understanding of audience targeting.
Influencer Marketing Hub has some useful questions you can ask yourself when trying to figure out who your target audience is, such as:
- Do you predominantly focus on one of the genders, or do you target both males and females?
- Which age groups are you most hoping to reach? Do you appeal to some generations more than others?
- What types of incomes do your typical customers have? Do you target people with plenty of spare money or people who tend to have money issues?
- What types of values does your target audience have in common?
There are all sorts of more specific questions you can ask yourself as well, but those four are an effective starting point. The more specific you are, the better. A broad target audience doesn’t necessarily mean a large following.
Be Clear
It can be tempting to keep your messages and values broad in hope that you’ll appeal to more people, but that doesn’t work. Having strong values is much more attractive to people who have the same ones as you. Without clear values, people won’t grow attached to your brand. You want to target people with the same values as you.
“When users come across your content on social media, they’re bound to click through to your profile. Then, they will only spend a few seconds deciding if you’re worth following. This is why it’s essential that you have a clear brand message.” – Like A Voss
Create Content That Your Target Audience Can Relate To
When you are able to be more specific with your target audience, you are able to find and create content that they will personally love and relate to. When someone sees something that they relate to, especially when it’s very specific, they are far more likely to share it. When they share that, they’re showing it to all their followers who are likely all people within your target audience. A very niche thing can have a very large reach.
“Ideally, you will target a selection of content at them—a mix of curated content and original content on the topics that interest them. You can throw in the occasional promotion, too.” – Influencer Marketing Hub
When people value your content and feel seen, they’re far more likely to share and follow over very generic and boring content.
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