A lot of businesses that are a hit offline, simply cannot succeed on social media, no matter how engaging their content is. It’s because their content doesn’t reach the proper audience. The problem that lies here is that these businesses make no real effort to find their target audience on social media.
Why Is Identifying Your Target Audience Important?
Too many still see social media marketing as a place solely to sell goods – just like much traditional marketing. Yet modern audiences hate and resist hard selling techniques. Social
media marketing is an extension of content marketing – sharing relevant information to the "right" group of people. If you do this often enough, these people will begin to take notice of you and start to take an interest in your products.
To create effective messaging within your marketing campaigns, you first need to define your target audience. A social media target audience is a group of people whom you've identified that you want to appeal to. This can be based on the following:
· Location (local, national or international)
Demographics (age, gender, occupation, income level, marital status)
Psychographics (values, hobbies, lifestyle, personality, attitude, behaviour)
Customer’s buying habits
Personality type (persona) and pain points
Competition
Your social media target audience consists of the people who are most likely to be interested in your product. Narrowing your audience will also help to save up on advertising. Iit’s better to spend your advertising money on a smaller, more engaged cluster than on a scattered large demographic.
Configuring Your Target Audience
There are many ways in the marketing world helpful in locating the correct audience.
When we talk about types of target audiences, we're talking about more ways to define who you're creating a campaign for. You can segment your audience into groups or define them further using categories such as:
Purchase target: — Clusters of people who are looking for a particular product and want to collect more information before doing so. Some examples include consumers buying a new laptop, vehicle, clothing, or television. This data is necessary to see how you can better direct your messaging to your audience.
Interests: — This is data about what people are into, like hobbies. Knowing this data helps you connect with your audience in a relatable way and unearth buyer motivation and behaviours. For example, consumers who enjoy road biking as a hobby are likely most interested in new road bikes in the spring, when the weather is warmer and the road racing season begins.
For example, if you find that a large number of potential audiences are interested in traveling, you can figure out a way to work that message into your marketing campaign to appeal to more potential buyers.
Subculture: — These are groups of people who find a shared experience based on their location. An example of this would be a specific music scene or genre of entertainment. People define themselves by subcultures, and companies can use those cultures to understand who they're reaching out to. One of the examples for this is, in 2012, Dunkin' Donuts, a quintessentially American that purveyors an American thing, larded sugar-dough is launched in India. They are now spread across the country sell many products that will be familiar to American consumers: coffee, bagels, sandwiches, and, yep, doughnuts but they have also introduced items into their menu that were formulated specifically for Indian consumers: veggie burgers, lychee collates, and spicy sandwiches.
Their doughnuts themselves also come in country-specific flavours. And to celebrate Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, in India, Dunkin' Donuts just launched several new flavours of the breakfast item that is actually a dessert. Among them: a Kesar Badam , a Soan Papdi doughnut coated with chickpea flour and many more.
As you've probably guessed, coming up with a target audience involves some research, which goes into fleshing out who you want to reach and how you can get there in a way that stands out from competitors.
How to Analyse And Define Your Target Audience?
Defining the target audience for a particular marketing campaign requires data. Unfortunately, there isn’t clairvoyance that can tell you how to adjust your messages to bring in the right audience. But that’s not to say you can’t trust your gut.
You know your business better than anyone, so combine that experience with hard data to generate a market segment and target audience that is characteristically human and strategically defined by scientifically gathered data. Social media audience research isn’t complicated. It’s mainly about narrowing your focus while expanding your reach.
Here are some of the ways that may help you analyse.
1. Conduct Surveys For Your Target Audience
To get the full information, it’s necessary to know what your audience thinks, per se their perspective. Surveys are a big component of content marketing best practices. It is a good idea to survey your real customers and find out which social networks they prefer. As a part of your survey, ask your current customers the following questions:
What is your favourite social media site?
Do you regularly read blogs? (Please, name them)
What people do you follow on social media?
Use free Google Forms to collect your answers or Type Form.
For instance, brands like Netflix, Zomato posts various polls and surveys on their social media to know more about the target audience.
To uncover key audience insights, use Google Analytics to drill down into your site traffic and perform a deep audience analysis. Custom audience reports can show you demographic and psychographic data, geographic locations as well as the types of technology your site visitors use.
2. Determine Your Target Audience Size
Facebook ads are not just a place for your promotions, but they also show you some clear data about your target audience and its size. For example, if you want to reach men and women in Mumbai interested in social media marketing, you can find out that thousands of people on Facebook match that audience. If your audience is too large like this one, you might want to target a narrower niche to start.
You should also know your niche influencers, platforms, and blog where your customer hangs out. Facebook Ads will help you with this, and you will narrow your list up to those who are really interested in your page.
3. Use Social Listening To Find Conversations About Your Brand
Social listening is essential to uncover conversations about your business, and your products. Monitoring relevant keywords and hashtags reveal what people are saying about you and your competitors online, even when you’re not tagged.
Reaching out in response to these social posts is a great way to find your target audience on social media, even if they’re not yet following you.
You can also use social listening for deeper social media audience research. As you monitor keywords and hashtags, you may uncover other relevant hashtags your audience uses. You can then test adding these hashtags to your social posts to extend your reach to more relevant users.
4. Lookalike Audiences And Ad Targeting
Lookalike audience targeting is one of the most straightforward ways to reach more of your target audience on social media. Lookalike audiences share characteristics and behaviours with people who already interact with your brand.
Don’t have a customer or subscriber list yet? You can still use precise targeting options to target social ads. You’ll then reach exactly the audience you defined during your research.
If you’re targeting more than one audience, you can target your ads so that each audience sees the content most relevant to them.
Make sure you structure the content of the ads to appeal to exactly the audience you’re targeting as well. Ask yourself: Does the language speak exactly to the market you have defined in an appropriate voice? Do the visuals make sense in the context of your target market?
5. Create Personas
Creating personas are a great way to drill down into the specific segments that make up your target audience. This is especially helpful if you have a product that appeals to a wide swath of consumers. Personas allow you to determine the general demographics, personalities, and needs of your target consumers. Personas are created based on data, surveys, digital engagements and any other information marketers can pull from to give a more complete view of the buyers. This might include favourite hobbies, television shows, publications, etc. It is recommended that marketers develop between three and five personas.
6. Look at Your Competitors
When you're trying to flesh out your target audience on social media, look to your competitors. What kind of voice are they using? Who are they appealing to?
You can figure this out by looking at who's responding to their posts and engaging with them. Also, take note of what social networks they're active on, who their top followers are, what their engagement rate is, and what hashtags they use.
Additionally, you can search for keywords that you're targeting on social media apps and see what competitors show up.
Plus, you can even use your own analytics to see other pages that your audience likes. For example, McDonald’s would point out KFC, Subway, and Burger King. It means that they will reach those people who aren’t interested in those other 3 fast-food chains.
It’s a difficult task to find the people who care about you and what you offer in the massive world of social channels and users. But if you take the time to clarify who they are, and what they like and dislike, it makes finding them and interacting with them a lot easier.
Happy campaigning!
