- The right formula to find your target audience on social media
- Published 03/05/2023
- 9 min Read
- Written by Julia Shandrokha
Table of contents
Defining your target audience is the foundation of any social media marketing campaign. By the target audience marketers mean a particular group of people sharing common characteristics who you aspire to reach with your brand message. There exists no content that would be interesting to everyone on the planet. Therefore it’s so important to define your potential clients as clearly as possible – to know how and where to speak to them. Defining the target audience will help you focus on the right social media channel or channels, and to create appealing content for your audience.
ADVANTAGES OF KNOWING YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
The better you know your audience, the more accurate your marketing efforts are going to be. It will save you a lot of budget money and reduce promotional expenses if you target the right people and attract to your brand accounts only those who are interested in your product or service. Knowing your target audience’s way of thinking, their desires and fears would definitely help you to create the content people will take confidence in.
If you are aware of your target audience it will be easy for you to understand the following how-to’s:
- How to present and promote your brand.
- How to explain the advantages of your product or service for the targeted people.
- How to choose the most appropriate social channels.
- How to speak to your audience on social media.
- How to set the optimal price.
THE RIGHT FORMULA TO TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE
We suggest using the right formula to define and identify your best customers on social media. The guidelines will be as follows:
- Research your current social media channels using social networks native tools and special services
- Identify your competitors and assess their audiences
- Generate feedback from your existing customers
- Highlight the benefits
- Target your audience
Let’s now examine this formula step by step.
Research on social media
Researching your existing customers is the best way to understand the portrait of your target audience. As soon as you learn the defining traits of your followers on social media, you will get the opportunity to find the look-a-like people. Most social media platforms offer its native analytical tools that help to find out what subscribers are interested in your brand account.
Social media analytics can tell you a lot about such basic metrics as age, gender, and location. These people might not be your customers yet, but nevertheless they are interacting with your account and you have a chance to convert them into your clients.
The first stage before planning any marketing actions is answering the basic questions to form a background for your target audience on social media:
- Do you target more males or females, or both genders?
Men and women definitely have various ways of thinking and motivations.
- Are you going to focus on some generations more than on others? What is your target audience’s stage of life?
You’re going to have different approaches to young parents and parents of teens, to students and retirees. Examine, for example, how people’s reasons for using social media platforms vary depending on their age:
You see, that even such an indicator as age alone can affect your marketing actions on social media. Gen Z’s representatives, for instance, are looking for a sort of inspirational material. Thus, if you target this age group, you should consider sharing motivating and exciting content for them.
- What is your target audience’s geographical location?
If you have an international business, then you have to give a tight description of a potential customer for each region. You should consider not only time zones but also different needs and desires, different mentalities. The Arabians, for instance, perceive not only text but also visual information from right to left. For example, if you launch an advertisement for an innovative hair growth remedy and portray a bald man turning into a man with beautiful hair, it will be a dangerous mistake to depict a bald man on the left and a hairy one on the right!
Answers to these basic questions form the demographic background of your potential customers. To figure out this information, along with social media analytical tools, you can use special services. UTM parameters in combination with Google Analytics, for instance, will ensure useful basic metrics for your audience. You will get to understand who’s interested in your products and services in order to determine your brand strategy or launch a new advertising campaign. With this background in mind, you can go further and narrow down your target audience according to more specific traits as well as segment people according to relevant parameters.
Identify the competitors
Competitor analysis is as important as the research of your own accounts. You should take into consideration whether your competitors are reaching the same target audience as you are. Probably, they target some other segment you haven’t considered yet? What social channels used by your competitors work most effectively? It also may be well worth your time to examine comments that people leave on your competitors’ accounts. Comments say a lot about customers’ thoughts and pain points, problems they are tackled with and their aspirations. Use this feedback to your advantage and suggest something more desirable for your target audience.
Here at Famesters influencer marketing agency, we also pay great attention to assessing the competition. Before launching your ad campaign, the Famesters experts are making a comprehensive research not only in terms of the relevant influencers and their audiences but also your competitors. If you want your advertising campaign to be based on a thorough data analysis, our professionals will be happy to help you.
Generate feedback to get deeper insights
As long as you’ve created a database of your current customers and formed their background, it’s time to survey your existing audience. The aim is to acquire a deeper understanding of who they are: their interests and passions, what information they would like to know more about, their challenges and more. It would be helpful to find out:
- Social-economical characteristics
Such points as education, level of wealth, spending power and patterns also determine the way you reach customers and help in understanding what features of product and services to highlight. For example: if you offer a new wristwatch to a young specialist with an average salary, then you should stress such advantages as high quality,functionality and reliability of the watch at a reasonable price. At the same time when you offer the same product to a top manager, it’s worth pointing out how this stylish and elegant watch can emphasize the status of a person.
- Psychographic characteristics
This is about people’s ways of thinking, values, interests and hobbies, their lifestyles in general. This information will be extremely helpful for understanding the emotional triggers of your target audience. If you get to know your customers so well, it will be easy for you to motivate them in the right way. You can make interesting questionnaires on social media to find out this information. Encourage your followers to share their thoughts in comments. Be interested in your audience, and people will get interested in your brand, too.
- Behavioral characteristics
As soon as you’ve described who your customers are, what their demographic, social, economical and psychographic traits are, it’s a turn to figure out how they are making a purchase decision. Surveying your customers, try to answer the following questions:
- What are the circumstances that make a person think about buying this or that product (or using this or that service)?
- What people’s problem will this purchase solve?
- Where is it easier for customers to make an order? Where do they prefer: online marketplaces or offline stores?
- Why do people delay a purchase, hesitate, or go to your competitors?
- Why can they change their mind and return?
Researching your existing customers with the help of surveys, questionnaires, social media polls, plus reading comments and all sorts of feedback can say a lot about their pain points, problems and motivations. It’s useful for comprehending the behavior patterns of your target audience. A lot of valuable information can be provided by customer support teams if you have such in your company. People who work in support know all the challenges potential buyers are tackled with as well as questions people frequently ask, and that also can add a lot to the description of your average customer.
Highlight the benefits
Here you ought to clarify the real value of your product. Even if you numerate the best features of your product or service all day long, hardly anyone will be persuaded to buy from you unless you highlight the benefits. The question you have to answer is “How can my product or service change one’s life, making it easier, or better, or more fascinating?”
Explain the results to your customers: what they would get if they use your product or service? If you have hesitations about the benefits from your product, you can once again ask your current customers. Conduct a social media poll, or ask people to fill out question forms after making an order. Thank them for that, saying that they help you improve your service. As a result, you might even find out new reasons why people buy from you. That can significantly change your whole perception of your audience as well as your marketing strategy.
When creating your benefit statement, you’re going to clarify the basic things about your target audience by default. Crafting it, try to include the most important demographic and behavioral characteristics of your audience. If you offer multiple products or services, it’s worth setting your benefit statements for each segment of your target audience.
Target your audience
As long as you’ve depicted a full portrait of your target audience, it’s high time to connect with them and address them with your messages. As a marketer, you need to decide what social networks to focus on.You can develop your existing accounts further, or you need to create additional brand accounts on some other social media sites to benefit from cross-promotion. In some cases, as with Facebook Ads Manager, you’ve got a great opportunity to target narrow niches of people using a great many filters offered by the service. Besides, you can upload your database of existing customers and Facebook will find them on the platform. The same features work with Instagram. Not every social network works with CRMs, so don’t hesitate to use this option to your advantage.
If you want to reach your audience effectively, the two directions you should pay your close attention to are as those: creating relevant content, and cooperating with influencers with similar target audiences.
CREATE RELEVANT CONTENT
Marketing on social media is mainly about creating a sort of content that resonates with your target audience. Your social pages need to be useful and inspirational. No one would love to scroll through endless promotional posts and ads. You should share original content on interesting topics and experiment with different types of content. Social media analytical tools will help you to analyze what posts tend to be more engaging in comparison with others. But whether it be motivational quotes or serious blog posts, funny reels or quizzes, remember not to be too salesy in regards to your audience. Sure, a small part of your content is going to be promotional, but people will follow your profiles only if they see value in your posts. So don’t go all about selling. Instead, you can offer support, share valuable information within your niche, and even be a sort of entertainment posting content that people would like to share with their friends.
FIND YOUR INFLUENCERS
One more marketing tool to reach your audience in a most efficient way and also to attract look-a-like followers to your account is cooperating with influencers,or more precisely – with influencers who target the same audiences as you are. Influencer marketing is so popular today because its ROI is 11 times greater than other kinds of advertising.
Let’s take consumers’ behavior on Instagram as an example. The BuzzGuru research has revealed that more than 80% of Instagram users leverage the platform to discover and research new products and services. 50% of consumers have visited a brand’s site to purchase what they saw on Instagram. 87% of people confirmed that their purchase decision was influenced by an Instagram influencer. Thus, it’s going to be an excellent idea for your business to leverage influencers’ impact on their followers.
When searching for relevant content creators, remember only to check that their audiences correlate with yours. Professionals from Famesters influencer marketing agency are always ready to assist you with that task. The agency works with all the major social media platforms – Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and others. Your business will benefit from manifold creative data-driven solutions to achieve your performance goals and KPIs with the help of influencer marketing.
WRAPPING UP
Summing all this information up, it needs to be noted that data-driven, targeted marketing on social media is impossible without identifying your target audience precisely. Even the most creative promotion efforts will go down the drain and won’t bring the desired effect if you are wrong with finding your target audience on social media. You do have to be aware of your potential customer profile so you would speak to your followers in the appropriate manner. Once you’ve found the right people to target, you can choose the right platforms and create an effective content-plan that will be appealing to your audience. The advantages of finding your audience will extend further: if everyone in your company is well aware of who they produce and sell for, then you can make well-informed decisions about what changes your product or service needs, or in what way you can alternate your offer according to people’s behavioral patterns and purchase thinking.
Besides, if you plan to launch an influencer marketing campaign, accurately knowing your target audience will help you to choose influencers with needed followers as definitely as possible. If you turn to the Famesters full-cycle influencer marketing agency, you will have an opportunity to develop an authentic data-driven marketing campaign, choose the best content creators in your niche according to a variety of smart filters – thanks to our own hi-tech app, and get magnificent results in terms of high ROI and achieving your KPIs. Get ahead of the competition with the Famesters team of experts!
TAGS :
