How to determine and reach your target audience on social media

PostPaddy

December 2, 2022
8:34 pm

How to Determine and Reach your Target Audience on Social Media

Interacting with your own ‘tribe’ can help narrow down your messaging, develop a solid and authentic brand image and make a definite impression on your audience.

PostPaddy

December 2, 2022
8:34 pm

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Introduction

Finding your target audience on social media is an essential step in your journey to growth, brand relevance and increased revenue. Although it is largely dependent on knowing your brand intimately and well enough to establish the identity and demographics of your target audience.

Understanding your brand and its value offering is integral to knowing and serving your target audience effectively. Because your audience is the crop of people–out of the broader pool of generalized audience–who find the most value in your brand, identifying them within the digital space can help you make a statement that draws their attention to you, appeals to their emotional side and connects you with a community of people who have shared interests, especially on the platforms of their choice. Simply put, you take your message to those who need it right where they are.

More so, interacting with your own ‘tribe’ can help narrow down your messaging, develop a solid and authentic brand image and make a definite impression on your audience. But then, who are these people that make up your target audience?

Your target audience refers to a selection of people (both present and potential consumers) who are most likely to require your products or services. Their interest in your value offering depends on factors such as age, gender, income level, parental status, location, educational qualification, aspirations, experience and more.

When you connect to your audience, you can direct your marketing efforts to the appropriate quarters and ensure that those you speak to share any connection with your brand in the first place. However, not all brands and business owners recognize the need for this and how it affects their marketing efforts.

Take, for instance, these statistics from Work It Daily, which show that an estimated $37 billion is lost to improperly targeted ads annually! With marketing spend this huge, businesses looking to rake in profit lose potential revenue and also reach people who are not interested in their products and services. By doing so, this category of people will likely be put off when they encounter frequent marketing messages within a short while.

Let's consider some of the implications of not being able to find your audience online:

Targeting a generalized audience makes it harder to reach your ideal customers. While it may seem like you’re chasing many potential customers, you are simply being heard by less than those who genuinely require your value.

Your brand positioning and marketing messages will not resonate with your audience. In trying to reach many more people for your brand, you will fail to use the language that speaks to their needs and pain points, failing to attract those who need your service.

You expend resources to maintain people who have no intent to take profitable action. Alternative to the previous point, wrong targeting draws in people without a knack for what you have to offer. It then puts you in a cycle of remarketing to ill-fitted clients and making repeated efforts to sell to them.

It becomes almost impossible to upsell, cross-sell or improve your offerings: Whether it’s a sale or sign-up you ultimately want from your target audience, it becomes harder to present them with the option of your brand when you cannot anticipate their journey or understand what matters most to them.

Your brand becomes indistinguishable from the competition. The problem with a generic brand is that it gets lost in the crowd of competitors. You can differentiate your brand through Niche Marketing and establish your brand for profitable good.

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So, how can you find and reach your target audience with social media? Let’s consider 5 ways:

1. Surveys: Engage your audience and get to know what makes them satisfied through social surveys or campaigns that collect their personal details and other relevant information that helps you identify those who make up your loyal community. To get started, consider looking to those who already buy your product or service. Surveys can be collated through online questionnaires, feedback forms, and interviews, among others.

2. Create personas: Develop your customer personas to help you understand the specific attributes of those interested in your brand. Identifying the unique segments and characteristics common to those who interact with your brand makes it easier to know your ideal customer, what they want, where they are, and why they are looking for you.

3. Use analytics tools: Leverage the regular audience insights on your social media platforms. This extensive research helps you know who falls within your audience circle and understand the reason or frequency of their engagement with your posts (or with brands like yours). Alternatively, look for new followers by noting and interacting with recurring handles on your competitors’ pages and see what sort of profile they fit. From there onwards, you can launch ad campaigns that capture this audience, accommodate their needs and help them access your intended message.

4. Engagement Monitoring: Integrating social listening tools with your social media channels helps you filter what is being said about your brand and by whom it is being said. Further assessing this bulk of data can be valuable in helping you analyze your audience inside and outside across several marketing channels: email marketing, web and search engine marketing, and social media platforms.

5. Engage in frequent reassessment: As you employ other measures outlined here, you will gather more data and insight into who your customers are over time. By keeping up a consistent culture of interacting with your existing community enthusiasts, maintaining correspondence with them about your latest brand and industry updates, and assessing the feedback from software solutions, you will better understand who is out for the value you offer and how best to stay connected to them.

In all, remember that beyond the numbers, metrics and data you’re gunning for, at the centre of all social media and marketing efforts, your target audience are humans. And to get them to love what you stand for, you have to provide real value and gain their trust as a leveraging tool to reach even more prospective audiences.