In the ever-growing world of social media, finding the right audience to grow your platform is crucial.. They are hard to come by but when you finally crack the code of finding your social media audience you get the people who are truly interested in your products and services.
A strong social media strategy is needed to grow your brand and it boils down to one thing only- understanding the social media audience you are targeting. A successful marketing strategy would be one where the audience would see your content and immediately identify your brand subconsciously. Over time they might also visit your website and turn into customers, all you need to achieve this is to use the right strategies and tools through which you can identify the common characteristics in your targeted audience. If you’re looking to maximize your social media impact without breaking the bank. Explore effective strategies for social media marketing on a budget to enhance your audience targeting with cost-effective methods.
Identifying the common factors in the audience that consumes your social media content can help you identify your perfect audience on social media. These common factors can be age, gender, income, interests, pain points, or goals. For example, the target audience for a luxury men’s jewelry brand might have the following factors in common:
- Male
- Age 14-30
- Modest income
- Interest in accessories, pushing the boundaries of societal constructs of gender clothing, or just an interest in shopping
A post after identifying your perfect audience on social media would then cater to this specific demographic and the content would revolve around these interests.
Why is it Important to Find Out About Your Social Media Audience?
Knowing who you are catering to on social media is essential to give you direction and a clear and realistic goal to achieve by the month’s end. Understanding social media demographics and where your targeted audience lies can help you plan and create more effective and organic campaigns that utilize your money in the right direction and also yield results.
The benefit that yields from knowing about your social media audience are multi-faceted, and includes the following:
- Boosting performance: Creating content that is centered around the interests of your audience can help you improve your social media’s key performance indicators leading to a more effective advertising campaign on social media that will be liked. This will increase the likes, shares, and comments on your posts which will be then amplified and increase your page’s reach.
- Identifying new areas to grow: The audience targeting strategies can be improved when one knows who they are speaking to. If the interests and pain points of the audience are identified the brand can find new and creative topics to expand their content on to tap into a new set of audience altogether.
- Refining the brand’s voice: The right audience will help you refine your own voice as they will ensure it resonates with them. If there exists a distance between your intended brand voice and the audience you currently have, then either you need to find creative solutions to bridge the gap or let go of the current audience which is unfit for your brand and what it stands for.
- Building loyalty towards brand: Constantly sharing targeted content can help you build trust and loyalty within your audience.
- Recognition: With the right audience comes a rapport that the brand maintains with its content. This content shared also has some underlying common factors which leads to subconscious recognition in the audience to a level where they do not even have to read the brand’s name to recognise their content. These factors can include a particular lighting, editing method, or script writing.
Incorporating influencers into your strategy can significantly boost your reach. Learn how to leverage influencer marketing to connect with the right audience and increase brand visibility.
How to Target the Right Social Media Audience?
Before diving into the social media landscape, it is necessary to have a clear picture of your ideal customer profile to target the right social media audience. This involves using the UX designer’s exercise of creating detailed buyer personas which represent your targeted audience.
Some factors you need to consider when making these personas are:
- Demographic, ie age, gender, location, income, education, occupation, and the like
- Challenges or pain points, ie what are the problems your users are facing? What are their frustrations? How are you helping them resolve these pain points?
- Goals and aspirations, i.e. what do they wish to achieve? What are their dreams, and goals?
- Psychographics, ie interests, hobbies, values, lifestyle, attitudes, behaviors
- Online behavior, ie where do they spend their time online? Which platforms do they prefer?
After you have a deep understanding of your ideal customers, you can start planning your audience engagement strategies to resonate with them.
After you find your target audience you can use these strategies for audience targeting on social media to increase your engagement:
Analyze Your Competitor’s Audience
Performing an in-depth analysis of your competitor’s audiences like a cheat code in real life, can make your process of finding the right social media engagement for your brand easy. Since they are your competitors it is likely they target the same people you wish to reach so you can collect and evaluate their social media data to see what they are doing right and what you can do better.
There are multiple tools available in the market to assist you in this process like One2Target. You can use these tools to your advantage and identify the gaps left by your competitors that you can fill in.
Tap into the Voice of Your Customers
Social media marketing done right for a brand is when the voice of the customers can be tapped into. On social media, everyone has become quite liberal with their comments and reviews. Using this to your advantage is important to increase the brand’s presence and engagement. The voice of the customers includes direct and indirect feedback given to the brand by existing and potential customers. These can be found through reviews, comments, as well as surveys.
Identifying the importance of this data can lead to achieving all the set targets for the brand as it includes not only the target audience’s pain points but also the personas you need to keep in mind when creating content. Look for patterns of complaints, praises or questions along with the age groups, locations and other themes in the responses for a better understanding. Creating content that resonates with your target audience is key to a successful social media presence. Discover how to craft a killer content marketing strategy that aligns with your audience’s interests and drives engagement.
Staying Updated with Social Media Trends
As much as social media trends seem useless and oftentimes silly, this is where your audience is. Your target audience is bound to be a consumer of these social media trends and keeping an update on these and using it in your content is essential to increase your brand’s growth.
For example, on Instagram memes were the trending way to reach the audience but after the introduction of reels, the faster and easier way to reach a new audience is through reels. Staying updated with the latest social media trends is essential to reaching your audience effectively. Stay ahead by following the top social media trends to keep your content relevant and engaging for your audience.
Run Social Media Campaigns
To have your business noticed by a precise target audience you can run social media campaigns targeting your right audience. For example, Meta lets you run targeted ad campaigns based on the user’s income, job, interests, age, location, gender, read more on Designrush.
Conclusion
Many brands are already incorporating these methods into their social media marketing strategies to reach their target audience. You can also manage to find the perfect audience for your brand with a little trial and error. Remember finding the right audience for your social media is an ongoing process which requires patience, experiments, and a deep understanding of your target market. You can build a loyal and engaged following by using what fits your brand’s voice to drive your business’s growth.