Are you struggling to reach the right people on social media? That’s a common issue for those new to social media marketing, don’t worry.
It’s also an issue that can seriously affect your marketing efforts’ results. If you can’t reach the right people – your target audience – you’re basically wasting marketing resources.
To avoid that, we’ll show you how to reach your target audience on social media. Our guide will go over the steps to defining, finding, and even engaging your audience on social media platforms, letting you get closer to your marketing goals.
How to Define Your Target Audience on Social Media
Before you can find your audience, you need to define who they are first! You can’t search for something without knowing its characteristics, after all.
Here are some steps that can help you do this.
1. Create an ideal customer persona
The customer persona can be a powerful tool in defining your target audience. It’s basically a generalised or idealised representation of the people you consider your customers – and thus, the people you want to reach.
Start by identifying your ideal customer. Try noting things like their age, gender, income level, interests, and buying habits.
You can also include information about the ideal customer’s demographics, behaviour, pain points, and goals.
All of this information will help you create a profile for your customer persona. From this, you can gain a deeper understanding of your target audience and what makes them tick.
This can help you develop more effective marketing strategies that resonate with them, obviously. After all, if you understand their motivations, the way they speak, and more, you have a better idea of how to craft messages that they can relate to.
2. Research demographics
Yes, we already mentioned this, but it’s so important that it deserves its own section! Demographics refer to the characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, income, education, occupation, and location.
Looking deeper into this can help you gain insights into your audience in so many ways. From identifying possible common denominators for specific subsets (like those most likely to be repeat customers) to matching lingo to audience preferences, that’s a wealth of info you can use!
To get started on this, use social media analytics tools to analyse the demographics of your existing followers and customers. This can help you understand who is already engaging with your brand on social media.
3. Identify pain points
Pain points are problems or challenges that your potential customers are experiencing and are seeking solutions for. Knowing these is crucial if you want to learn how to engage your audience on social media!
You see, if you identify these pain points, you can get a better understanding of the needs, preferences, and behaviours of your target audience.
You can then tailor your marketing messages, services, product offerings, and more to address their pain points and provide solutions that meet their needs, causing them to pay attention to you!
One way to do that is by fine-tuning your content. Research your target audience and learn what types of marketing messages work best for them and on what topics.
What are they asking about? What queries do they need answered? In what language do they prefer those answers delivered? In what tone?
Just knowing who your target audience is won’t matter, after all, if you don’t end up talking to them about the things they find interesting in a way they find interesting.
4. Monitor competitors
Look at the social media profiles of your competitors to see who’s engaging with them and how. That’s often a good way to see who your target audience should be!
As a bonus, analysing competitors lets you see how the competition is attracting people. It can even help you identify gaps in the market to capitalise on, say through competitors failing to address a specific pain point or need.
Observing competitors’ interactions with their audiences can also help you get insight into that shared audience’s behaviours. You can see how they respond to various messages or strategies, giving you an idea of which ones work best!
How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media
All right, so now you know what your target audience is like. Let’s move on to actually reaching out to or finding it on social media platforms!
1. Use social media tools like ads
As explained earlier, you can use the analytics tools available on social media platforms to identify the demographics of your audience, including their age, gender, location, and interests.
Well, from there, many social media platforms actually give you tools that help you reach other people who have the same traits – i.e. people who may well be part of your target audience as well.
These tools are particularly useful if you’re doing social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to target audiences based on demographics you can specify, as well as interests and behaviours.
By using the platforms’ targeting options with your defined target audience’s traits, you can create more effective ad campaigns that have a higher chance of reaching the people they’re supposed to.
2. Engage with the right influencers
Doing influencer marketing is actually a great way to find the people who belong to your target audience. Influencers with a large following and high overlap with your target audience can amplify your message very quickly in all the right sectors!
Just make sure that you partner with influencers whose followers actually align with your target audience, of course. Otherwise, you’ll end up wasting resources on the partnership.
3. Participate in social media groups
TikTok’s user base is big. Think about 1.53 billion users, which represents over 30% of the globe’s Internet users.
The platform is now particularly popular with those aged 18-24, who represent 34.9% of its user base. Those aged 25-34 come next, at 28.2% of its users.
Then, those aged 13-17 make up 14.4% and those aged 35-44 make up 12.8%.
This makes it a great platform for reaching Gen Z and Millennial audiences. And as these generations age up, more and more businesses will likely get on TikTok to reach them.
Find and engage with your target audience on social media
Now that you know how to find your target audience on social media, you can create more effective social media marketing campaigns that reach and engage the right people.
If you’re still not sure how best to do that, however, there’s no shame in needing a little help. We’ve aided a lot of businesses in figuring out how to engage with their audiences on social media, as it happens, and we can do the same for you.
Simply get in touch and we’ll talk about what you may need to put your business on the map. Contact us for a chat about your digital marketing needs at any time!