How to define your target audience on social media

Defining a target audience can be one of the most challenging aspects of influencer and social media marketing. But once you have a clear idea of who your audience is, you’ll run more relevant campaigns with better returns to more engaged audiences!

Why do I need to define my target audience?

Why is defining a target audience so important? I mean, surely trying to appeal to as many people as possible will result in the most possible conversions? Not necessarily… did you ever hear the saying ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time?’ By trying to appeal to everyone, you could well end up not appealing to anyone! Defining your audience will:

• Ensure you advertise more effectively. Focusing on the groups most likely to convert will reduce ad spend waste and give a much healthier ROI.
• Help you develop a brand voice that resonates. This amplifies your?social media branding efforts by talking to your audience in their own language, making your brand accessible and authentic to them, promoting brand sentiment and loyalty.
• Let you develop targeted messaging. This makes it easier to connect with the audience most likely to convert and ultimately helps you drive sales.

Makes sense… so who is my audience?

Pull the analytics from your website and social channels. Start by taking a closer look at who are already following you or buying from you. Monitor who follows you on social media and interacts with your posts. Who likes, shares, comments on your content? Then narrow down on key common characteristics such as age, location, language, interests, etc.

Using the answers to these questions, you can start to build some nuanced audience profiles. This will help you clearly define how to talk to your followers and help you target other people with similar profiles who haven’t found you yet, and expand your pool of high-quality leads!

Now that you have all this insight into your target audience, it’s time to create content!

Here are some starting points:

• Try?A/B testing?different content elements, formats, timings and more. As a result, you’ll fine-tune your content strategy to the types of posts your target audience tends to engage with. Monitor what kind of captions they like,?which timing works best?to engage them and so on to keep building forward momentum.
• Remember to?create content for different stages of the?purchase funnel. Entertaining content may be great to capture attention at the awareness stage, but informative and instructional pieces work better for those at the consideration stage
• Be more direct with your audience research. Instead of assuming or solely relying on analytics data, consider what your followers really think by putting those insights into context. Conduct polls, host live Q&As, and hold live streams so you can engage them better.

Or… hand the job over to professionals and enjoy all the rewards without the risk and effort!