Successful social media marketing campaigns start with knowing your target audience and connecting with them. Humans are emotional beings, and connecting and engaging is what makes us human.
Social media is that one place that brands can get an audience they can engage, build trust, and nurture them to be customers.
Have you been wondering how you can identify your social media target audience to engage with it as you grow your brand? Here are some ways you can use to identify your audience and get them engaged with your brand on social media.
Why you need to define your social media target audience
- Know how to effectively spend your marketing budget. Knowing your target audience helps you understand their challenges well and the best way to engage them and solve those pains. You know the kind of content you should invest in, and plan your budget well. It helps to know the best way to spend resources and avoid unnecessary campaigns that don’t drive results for your business.
- Segment and engage them with the right content. Since your buyers are in different stages of the buyer journey, the knowledge of your target audience helps you segment and engage them at the right stage of the buying cycle.
- Know how they engage with your brand. Defining your audience helps brands create the best marketing campaigns, like the content they share on social media or ads that drive engagement to their website. You know how your target audience engages your brand through social media.
- Avoid the mistakes of targeting everyone. It becomes easy to target only the right audience and avoid reaching out to every person who may not even have an interest in your brand or need your product or services. With target identification, you narrow down your prospects and reach out to one with high potential to convert if well engaged and nurtured through social media.
- Grow your brand loyalty. When you know your audience, it increases your chance to grow your brand loyalty. You will be targeting them with content that adds value to their lives and provides solutions to their pains.
Target audience vs buyer persona
The target audience is a large group of people who share the same characteristics and have similar needs for given products or services. They fit within a given market range for products or services a brand offers. On the other hand, buyer personas represent a fictional ideal customer for your brand. The fictional representation includes details that highly define your customers like:
- Shopping habits
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Their pain points
- Motivations
The target audience shapes your brand marketing plan. How you will run your marketing campaigns and drive engagement to your business products or services. You know the big picture position of your brand marketing and what to target in your marketing campaigns.
How to Identify your social media target audience
Analyze your existing customers
One of the best ways to understand and identify your audience and engage is to analyze your customers. Know their purchase history, how they engage with your brand, and where they make purchases for the products or services they need.
If a customer makes purchases more than twice from your brand, they are likely to love and engage with your brand. See their browser history of the products they love and even how they search for solutions to their challenges.
Know the types of content they engage with most on social media and also on other platforms. Do they consume content like: Videos, texts, carousel, infographics, etc?
That will give you a tip on the content they value and one you can use to get their attention and engage them with your brand.
Check out your customer inquiries and support tickets to see the challenges they face or problems they need help with from the customer support team.
Use social listening tools
With social listening tools, you can know what your customers say about your brand. Know who mentions your brand or products and what they say about you to their friends. You can easily know where your brand stands amongst your competitors and how the potential target audience views your brand compared to your competitors.
In addition to using the tools, conduct surveys and polls to gather customer feedback on your brand. The information from these polls can help you create more targeted campaigns and content that will drive more engagement with your brand.
Ask your prospects questions related to your brand and their pains. What do they enjoy about you, and why do they love your brand? It gives you a great perspective of how they view your business and how you can use that to drive more engagement to your business.
Create content that addresses customer pains
The target audience loves and engages with content that speaks to them directly. Shows them the value of your products and how they can use them to solve their challenges. Creating such content encourages your users to engage with it and even share it.
Create and run a/b tests on different content on your social media channels. Track and analyze the content types that have high engagement. You can also use user-generated content campaigns from satisfied customers. Such content best helps you build trust and loyalty with the target audience. Another way is to create short video testimonials from your happy customers.
The target audience will trust it more as they can see proof that it provides value and solves customer pains. Another strategy is to analyze hashtag usage for content consumption. Some users search and consume content based on hashtags.
You can also track social posts that drive more prospects to your website. This proves that the target audience finds them valuable and wants to know more about the brand, so they can not only engage but also solve their pains. Use your most viral posts and create more content similar to them to drive engagement.
Competitor analysis
You can also identify your target audience by knowing more about your competitors. You are in the market for the same customers, and analyzing and knowing your competitors helps you understand your audience since they’re the ones you also want to target.
Ask questions like
- What content do they create
- How do they engage through comments, likes, etc
- See what content gets more engagement
These help you know more about how your target audience engages with your competitors. Since you also target them, you get a better idea to engage and draw them to your brand.
Check out the hashtags your competitors use for engagement and see how the target audience engages with content on those hashtags. See the audience that mostly engages with your competitor’s content through likes, shares, and comments. Those are good for your business, too.
Monitor user activities
By monitoring prospects on social media, you can get clues on the right target audience your brand needs. See who shares your content most. It shows they love your brand and the value you put on social platforms.
Also, you can identify your audience through their engagement with the content you create there. How they connect, give comments on your posts, and how often they do it. Here is what Eugene of Marketing Agency says
‘’For me, identifying the right audience always starts with listening, not posting. When we worked with a client in the wellness space, instead of guessing who their audience was, we dug into comment threads, competitor pages, and community groups to see what questions people were actually asking. That raw language revealed both the demographics and the pain points better than any static persona exercise.’’
See for the users who tag your brand or products on the content they create. Those are all likely to be your target audience, as they associate and value your brand.
Your target audience could also be those people who follow your company page. Research from Sprout Social Index shows that customers follow brands for reasons like getting updates on new products or services, or being the first to get offers and discounts.
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Those people who follow your brand want to know more about you and a right fit for you target audience.
Use the right platforms strategically
Target customer preferences change, and so do the social media sites they most engage with. Be strategic in your approach and target social media based on the audience you want to target the most. For example
LinkedIn is best suited for thought leadership and professional credibility. Instagram is about visual storytelling. TikTok thrives on quick, authentic moments. When you create content that fits each platform, it feels natural and keeps the audience engaged.
Each platform attracts unique visitors based on the content they are interested in consuming. Tailor your content for each site you want to engage on and where you want to attract leads from. Here is what Aaron, VP of Demand Generation & Marketing at Thrive Internet Marketing Agency, says about engaging the audience.
‘’On engagement, I didn’t reinvent the wheel. Instead, I redeployed creative that had already proven magnetic. The short-form Instagram Reels kept attention consistently, and they worked even better when paired with ad copy that had driven conversions in past campaigns. The Lookalikes echoed the profile of our best customers, which made the content connect naturally.
The campaign stopped feeling like blunt persuasion and instead became a more crafted expansion. From there, influence spread from a committed core of advocates rather than thinning into the haze of an indifferent audience.’’
Final Thoughts on Social Media Target Audience
Your audience engagement and growth increase when they feel they’re seen and heard. When you can relate to their pains and offer the best solutions to those pains. Match the message with the platform.
To best engage the audience, you’ve to identify them and know their challenges better. Use the above ways to identify and know your social media target audience and nurture them by providing the content that engages them.
