By identifying how to go through, find and communicate with your target audience will help you develop brand guidelines. What if we told you that you can save so much of your money on inventory and dedicate those funds into other things. Such as marketing towards your target audience a little better than what you’re already doing.
In this blog we’re going to give you tips and tricks about how to find your target audience and also how to target the right audience on social media.
Let’s dive into it!
What Is A Targeted Audience?
Audience is important to a large company or a small business because they need to make sure their products are meeting the audience’s needs. Knowing exactly who your audience is enables you to cater and adapt products for specific audiences so give the audience exactly what they want. Gain feedback about the success of a product from the right people and find gaps in the market.
So, if you make a program about different modes of transport and if you really understand my audience, I might know that the people that watch this program are mainly interested in cars. You can therefore give them programs catered to them might receive feedback that they want to know more about trains. You can cater to that as well and might also find that a small section of the audience likes bikes but no one else is making programs on bikes.
We know that this is a gap in the market. Even though it might be a small audience we can still do well from this program because no one else is doing it. That’s why companies need to understand their audience but companies also need to know how to categorize and define their audience:
So firstly a couple of terms you might come across are:
- Mass audience and
- Niche audience
This is fairly straightforward as a mass audience is a very large audience with a wide range of people. For example; BBC ONE has a mass audience.
A niche audience is a more specific audience and usually fairly small with a specific interest. A Youtube channel that talks about digital marketing would have a niche audience of people interested in this area.
Difference Between Target Market and Target Audience
The target market is the whole group of people that a brand may want to sell to. The target audience is a particular group of individuals within that market that the company expects to sell to.
For example, your target market may be entrepreneurs but your target audience is a subsection within that market, specific type of entrepreneur. An entrepreneur that sells their products and services online.
When you know the difference between your target market and your target audience, these are going to give you some clues to where you can reach online through the various social media platforms that we have access to.
For example, if your niche is professionals, maybe your audience is on LinkedIn. If your niche is fitness or maybe food, your audience may be on Pinterest. Finally, if your niche is photography, you’re an artist, your audience may be on Instagram.
So, after hearing that, where does your audience hang out? What platforms do you know that they’re part of?
Focus Your Time on Those Platforms
When you know where your audience is, it’s best for you to focus your time on those platforms. Yes, there are so many platforms and a lot of shiny objects that can grab our attention. However, if you focus with the one or two that you know that your audience is on and really dial into that strategy, that can bring you huge lasting returns.
How Do I Find My Target Audience With Social Media?
Research the Content
Then once you know where your audience hangs out, what platforms they’re on. The next thing to do is research what kind of content they want to consume from you.
One of the best ways that you can research that is by seeing what your competitors are talking about by seeing what trends are capturing people’s attention and also by doing keyword and SEO research.
You can look at your competitors in the space or just other people that are speaking to similar subjects or expertise that you’re and see what kind of content they’re creating. See what their audience is responding to. See what you’re doing well, maybe they’re not doing so well.
There’s a lot of things we can learn from where people are kind of missing the mark and where we might be able to pick up where they’re leading off.
Another thing that you can do is see what kind of content people are searching for on YouTube. Are people looking for videos on topics that you can speak to that you’re an expert on? What are the topics that have already been covered by people in the space that you might be able to put my own unique spin on? Share your own stories, your own case studies, your own social proof to be able to captivate that audience.
When you know the types of problems that your audience has or the questions they’re asking or even the questions that your competitors are solving, this will give you some insights into how you can cater your content and your message to your target audience and be able to reach them on social media.
Keyword Research
We also mention in addition to competitor research to do some keyword research or SEO research. This is looking at whether people are searching on Google or YouTube.
You know, when people have a question, they have a problem that needs to be answered. Where do they go?
For some people, we go to our moms but for most of us we go to this Google machine. We type in our questions there and the answers can come up in the form of an awesome video or a blog article to any kind of website.
Now, there’s tools that you can use to see what other people are searching for. We recommend looking into SEM rush, TubeBuddy, or Google Keyword Planner.
When you know exactly how people are searching for these terms in these search engines, you can title your video the same way that they’re searching for them and that gives you a really great advantage to them being able to find you on platforms such as YouTube.
How Do I Find My Target Audience on Facebook?
We can certainly join Facebook groups and share your topic of expertise about your interest. However there’s also some things that you can do inside of your Facebook business account to create audiences.
Inside your Facebook business manager, there’s an audience manager tool.
Audience Manager Tool
When you’re in the business manager click on the menu on the top right and select audiences. Facebook has 3 primary audiences:
– Saved audiences,
– Custom audiences, and
– Look-a-like audiences
Saved audiences may be people who have engaged with you already, that might be following you, that liked your post. Custom audiences may be once that you create based on people’s interest, their location, their age range.
Look-a-like audiences are made based on people who are just like the ones who are already following and engaging with you. Each of these 3 options gives you additional options for narrowing down your target audience. So that you can be very specific in the people you reach through your Facebook ad campaigns.
How Do You Find Your Target Audience on Instagram?
Identifying your target audience is critical to your success with Instagram Ads. If you get this wrong, then your whole ad campaign can end up being a waste of money and time.
Fortunately, Instagram has a lot of good tools to help you to identify your target audience. A lot of people think that Instagram is just for teenagers who like to take selfies. There is certainly an element of that going on but there’s a lot more besides.
Well, it is true that Instagram appeals to a younger demographic, older people do use it as well.
Here’s the demographic breakdown:
- 18 to 29 year olds make up around 55% of the user base
- 30 to 49 year olds make up around 28% of the user base
- 50 to 64 year olds make up around 11% of the user base
- Adults over 65 make up around 4% of the user base
You should at least have some idea about who your target market is. If you are not 100% sure then this is okay. You can learn more about your audience as you progress with Instagram Ads. However, you don’t want to be wildly wrong about your target audience otherwise you can end up spending a fortune on ads and not achieve anything.
Your Core Marketing Persona
The best way to start to identify your target audience is with your core marketing persona. Other nuances can come later once you start to dig around into Instagram Insights and your Instagram Analytics after running some ads.
So we recommend that you start with a simple persona. For example; female aged 18 to 30 live in the USA. Once you have established this base persona, you can use the tools available with Instagram and third-party tools as well to go deeper.
There have been a number of significant improvements to the options available for ad targeting with Instagram. There are also some external tools such as Falcon that will help you to learn more about your audience.
One of the best ways to find out more about your audience is to look at your engagement on your old posts to see which content they responded the best to. This will really help you to avoid creating Instagram Ads that will not provide your audience with what they are looking for.
With instagram it is possible to create a custom audience based on the people that have interacted with your posted content on the platform already. If you have a list of business contacts you can also upload this to help create your custom audience.
Set up Your Target Audience
One of the great things about using Instagram ads is that you will use Facebook’s existing and comprehensive knowledge of demographics to present your ads to the right people.
So, for example; using your base persona if you want to target females between 18 and 30 that live in New York and are interested in healthy eating then you can easily do that.
Here are the most important audience targeting options that you have with Instagram Ads:
- Location Targeting: You can choose to target a specific Country, region, state, city and even zip code. You can include or exclude specific places as well.
- Age Targeting: You can choose age ranges from 13 years old to over 65 years old.
- Gender Targeting: You can choose to target males, females or both.
- Language Targeting: It is recommended that you leave this blank unless the language you are targeting is not common to your targeted location.
- Demographic Targeting: You can get into a lot of detail here. There are a lot of subcategories to choose from and some of these have sub-sub categories. As an example; you can select the home category then the home ownership subcategory and then choose renters. There are demographic choices around education, finances, live events, parents, politics, relationships, and more.
- Interests Targeting: Again you will find a number of categories and subcategories here. As an example; you can find people that have an interest in aviation or fine wines or science fiction movies here. There are so many possibilities.
- Behavior Targeting: This is another targeting area with a lot of choices. For example; you may be interested in a specific job role, purchasing behavior, anniversaries and a lot more.
- Connections Targeting: You can use it to target people that have connected with your app, event or page.
- Lookalike Audience: You also have the option to create a look-alike audience. Let’s say for example that you created a custom audience but you have tapped them all out. Well, you can ask Instagram to find a look-alike audience comprising of people that have similar traits to your custom audience.
Your Audience Guide
After you have made your choices to configure your target audience, you will be shown a guide that explains how specific or broad your audience is.
You will be told how broad your audience is, the potential reach in numbers and your estimated Daily results based on factors such as your budget, previous campaign data and market data.
You really need to pay close attention to the information you see here. It is important that the size of your audience is not too large. Which usually means that you haven’t targeted it enough but also not too specific since the audience members may be so small that it would not be worth running an ad campaign.
When you are satisfied with your targeted audience be sure to save it so that you can refer to it again and maybe use it for future Instagram Ad campaigns. We recommend that you create a few different audiences so that you can test which works the best. This is possible by creating multiple ad sets which you will see at the top of the Instagram Ads Manager.
