Define, Find, And Reach Your Target Audience On Social Media
You should keep your ideal audience in mind for any marketing campaign to be successful. This concept is true across traditional formats as well as social media. It can be difficult to pinpoint your target audience, but this practice is worth the investment. Your brand can create relevant, actionable campaigns by focusing on your core audience. Proper targeting leads to better results across your KPIs, including sales, conversions, and revenue. Cobblestone Marketing is here to help you identify the best audience for any social campaign. Explore our expert tips and learn how to define, find, and reach your target audience on social media.
Who Is Your Target Audience?
Your target audience includes the people who are most likely to be interested in your brand promise. This audience may contain individuals from many different demographics, but they’ll also have traits in common. You’ll consider how people use your services, the challenges that motivate your users, and other factors that determine your target audience.
Why Is Defining Your Target Audience Important?
Social media is a powerful, cost-effective tool for connecting with people. Billions of users around the world have access to your social media posts. With such an impressive reach, defining a target audience can seem unnecessary at times. Why talk to just a few people when you can talk to the entire world?
A target audience helps you communicate with people who are most likely to convert. No brand is relevant to the whole world’s population. General messaging isn’t specific to any group, so it gets lost in the chatter. On the other hand, building a target audience provides a range of benefits:
- More efficient advertising by targeting a few precise groups.
- Invest resources on the most valuable customer demographics.
- Create an authentic brand persona and voice that truly engages with your users.
- Craft resonant messaging that connects with prospective clients, encourages them to convert, and maintains their brand loyalty over time.
How To Define Your Target Audience
Here at Cobblestone, we view the target audience as a living, evolving concept. Your target audience should shift over time as you offer new services, your customers move through life stages, the market trends fluctuate, and other factors. If your target audience never changes, that’s a clear sign your product isn’t keeping up with the times! Perform regular social media audits to keep your audience concepts fresh. Explore the following tactics for defining your target audience.
Study Your Current Audience
Begin with the data you already have. We suggest examining your current community, including people who follow you on social media and customers currently using your products. These groups have already shown a clear interest in your brand. Study them for a baseline understanding of your audience.
Every social media platform lets you see information about your followers. Statistics, analytics, and other reports provide clear details about your followers. Look for defining characteristics like age, language, location, interests, and more.
Depending on the social media platform, you may be able to see more detailed insights as well. For example, Twitter provides information about your follower’s favorite topics. This kind of information helps you understand the people attracted to your brand.
Learn About Your Audience’s Needs
Once you have a basic understanding of your followers, you need to determine why they’re drawn to your company. What need do you fulfill for them? Here are some common reasons why people follow brands on social media:
- Logistical: ground-level information seeking about prices, service options, locations, and more
- Improved experience: best practices, pro-tips, life hacks, and other ways to make the most of your services
- Industry expertise: often seen in B2B, users follow you to learn more about the industry
- Community: engage with other people who use your services, or get to know your company as individual people
- Entertainment: users find your content funny, soothing, or otherwise enjoyable
- Aspirational: people are drawn to your brand promise even if they haven’t converted yet
Once you know why people follow your social media, you can create thoughtful, purposeful content that meets their needs.
Discover Where Your Audience Finds The Information They Need
Track your audience’s social media habits to see where they congregate. Look at your combined statistics from across platforms. You need a broad, holistic view of your users to communicate efficiently. If most of your audience follows you on one platform, prioritize connecting with existing users on that channel. Your less active accounts provide great opportunities to find new prospects.
Some brands discover demographic differences between platforms. For example, active Facebook users tend to be older than people on Instagram or TikTok. If you notice these trends, you should target your message accordingly.
Track Your Audience’s Conversation Points
Use social listening practices to see what your audience is actively discussing. Social listening involves studying content to discover trends, common interests, challenges, solutions, and more. This tool builds upon the insights you’ve gained from social media companies. Go beyond dry analytics. Social listening helps you understand your followers as people.
How To Reach Your Target Audience
By now, you should have a clearly defined target audience, plus valuable knowledge about your community’s demographics, needs, challenges, and interests. Put your new knowledge to work by reaching out to your audience.
Build Audience Trust
Trustworthiness is an important factor in the modern digital market. Think about your personal interactions with brands online. Which companies do you trust based on their social media behavior, and which do you avoid? Stay proactive about managing your social reputation. Be honest, reliable, and trustworthy to build and retain customer trust. Your audience will stay loyal to you if they trust you.
Determine Your Key Benefits
One of the best ways to reach your customers is by taking care of their needs. Identify your community’s pain points and built content surrounding these issues. If your customers are already using your services to solve a problem, share the successes with the rest of your audience. If you can create a new solution for an existing concern, that’s also useful content. You’ll boost engagement, conversion, and retention when you show your audience that your brand can make their life better.
Watch The Competition
There’s lots to learn from the other brands in your niche. Study your competition to see how they manage their audience, including:
- Their target demographics
- Outreach strategies
- Successful campaigns and missed opportunities
- Product benefits
- Posting frequency, content, format, and tone
Just because a competitor uses one strategy doesn’t mean it’s a good fit for your brand. However, it’s smart to adopt useful tools wherever you find them.
Create Tailored Content
It’s time to create content with your target audience in mind. Use what you’ve learned to craft social media campaigns that speak directly to your core audience. Keep their defining challenges and demographics in mind, connect on their preferred platform, and promote your most relevant brand promises. Track your results and watch your performance start to improve.
Exploring Your Target Audience With Cobblestone Marketing
Your target audience can drive your brand’s success. It’s important to define your core audience, learn about their habits, and communicate with them on social media. These steps build brand loyalty, boost conversions, and increase long-term user satisfaction. Use these tips to connect with your core audience on social media. If you’re ready for more, We can help you engage your community with expert guidance and cutting-edge strategies. Get in touch today to learn more.