Developing a clear understanding of your social media target audience is one of the most important things to do before starting with your marketing strategy. Your target audience informs all elements of your social media strategy going forward.
Before we get into the details, here’s a little tip: your target audience is not everyone! But there is plenty you can do to start defining and understanding your audience and we can also help with the rest.
Audience research will help you craft relevant content, messaging, and ads, which can lead to higher conversion rates.
But defining a target audience can be one of the most challenging aspects of marketing. But once you have a clear idea of who they are, your marketing will be more relevant and have better returns.
Here’s how you can start to define a target audience and reach them through social media.
First, let’s start by understanding what a target audience actually is. It’s a group of people you want to reach with your social channels who are most likely to be interested in your product or offer. They’ll share common traits or characteristics, like demographics and behaviours.
We’ve got three things you can do to start to find your target audience
Compile and look at your data on your existing customers and social media audience
You’ve got so much information already at your fingertips. If you have social channels already, there are lots of really interesting stats and facts in the analytics sections of your social media accounts. You’ll have data on who’s following you, interacting with your posts, and some demographic data.
But don’t forget the data you have of your existing customers, who regularly buy your products or services. They might not be online, but there is plenty of offline data there.
Look at your competition
Odds are, your social media audience overlaps with that of your competitors. So it’s worth checking out what they’re doing so you can benefit from the lessons they’ve already learned. Are they reaching segments you hadn’t thought to consider? How are they positioning themselves?
What is your unique point of view?
You’ll need to make sure you have a solid understanding of how your product or service makes your audience’s life:
- better
- easier
- more interesting
Does it solve their challenges? Address specific pain points? Help them meet their goals? All these questions will help you understand how your product or service helps your customers and you can start to use this as part of your marketing.
If you want to know more about how our team can help you define your audience and develop a robust marketing strategy, just pop a message to Hannah, our client relationship manager who would be more than happy to talk you through some of our flexible marketing and social media packages.
