Understanding Your Target Audience for Social Media

Starting a business alongside taking care of your online marketing can sometimes feel overwhelming, you have so many tasks to complete and social media can feel like one more thing on your never-ending list. The key to social media is quite simple, it’s all about understanding your target audience and putting yourself in front of them. So how can you understand your target audience? Let’s start with breaking down what a target audience is…

Your ideal audience on social media is a group of people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services, they are the people who need what you are offering and can be broken down into demographics such as age, location, income or interests. (This is often referred to as your ‘Avatar’). Your product or service could be the very best out there but if you place it in front of the wrong audience, you won’t get people to buy.

So how do you find your target audience? Let’s take a look

Research Your Existing Customers

If you already have customers who have purchased from you or clients you have worked with, find out more about them. Who are they? What motivates them? Why did they buy from you? Start answering these questions to start building a solid picture of your audience.

Research Your Competitors

Who are your competitors? You can learn a lot from their audience as you begin to research who might find your products and services valuable. Who follows your competitors on social media? Why do they follow? Are there areas of your own social media strategy you could improve to attract more people to your product or service? Whilst it’s important not to copy your competitors, you can use them to gather valuable information.

Create Personas

A persona is a character that represents your ideal customer, usually, you would have more than one persona, so start to think about what your ideal customer looks like. What’s their name? Where do they live? Do they have disposable income? Use this information to tailor your social media content for those people.

Use Your Knowledge

Once you fully understand who your target audience is, it’s time to use that knowledge to create the content they want to see and engage with. Share a mix of content which resonates with your ideal personas at each stage of the buying journey. The more human and relatable you are with this content, the more your audience will begin to trust and engage with you.

When you are just starting out, it’s tempting to try and appeal to everyone in the hope of selling something but if you really focus on your target audience you will create lasting relationships with your audience and see better results.

 

Do you need help with your social media content? Whether you need some expert guidance on how to reach your target audience or you need a ‘done for you’ social media service so you can focus on other business tasks, we can help. Get in touch!