Many people may not know that the secret arsenal for successful target social media marketing is about knowing the people and the community.
And just like in any social interaction, the relationship between the marketer and the people has to go both ways.
As a digital marketer, you have to find your target audience and learn what motivates them to follow, subscribe and become your loyal customer. After all, without an audience, all marketers would be marketing in empty spaces with zero conversion from the website.
So, What is Your Target Audience on Social Media?
A social media target audience is the specific audience you want to reach out to using your social media sites.
This group of people is most likely to be interested in what you’re offering; products, services, or relevant content.
People in the target audience share similar demographics such as location, socioeconomic status, and age. Understanding your target audience helps create more productive marketing objectives.
How To Define Your Target Audience?
Understanding your social media marketing target audience may be the absolute thing you have to do as a social media marketer.
Audience research helps you produce relevant content and ads.
And this will lead to higher conversion rates and effective social media ROI.
These are critical metrics for both social media and digital marketers.
You need to understand that your target audience is not every person on the planet. Your task is to define your social media audience and recognize your niche to dominate your market.
And ideally, create a more personalized and exciting experience for your target audience. Generic and mainstream content may help you gain more traffic, but it will not increase sales.
In this article, we’ll go through everything you need to know on how to find target audience on social media from basic setup to advanced execution.
We hope with well-planned ads and well-defined target audiences nothing is standing between you and social media marketing success.
The Importance of Finding Your Target Audience in 2021
#1 Clear Focus
It’s impossible to reach every single of your target audience at once; hence, emphasizing your efforts to a critical audience helps you create a successful customer-driven marketing strategy that dedicates to specific personas.
Practicing a common approach by assuming your consumers will come from the same segments or demographic details is no longer viable to sustain a new business in this era.
Based on the Small Business Encyclopedia, focusing on too many niches will only fail.
This is because today’s marketplace has changed. In pursuing potential customers, business owners must factor in age, lifestyle, gender, and technological sophistication.
Identifying your target audience offers a clear focus on whom your business will cater to and why those customers need your products and services. Understanding these details will keep your target audience at a feasible level.
#2 Prioritizing Resources
Your marketing strategy will be more cost-effective by defining your target audience because your campaign will run on a smaller but focused size.
As a business, you don’t want to appeal to the masses; instead, you want to strongly appeal to a targeted group of people who are likely to do business with you.
People often overlook brands that don’t directly connect with them, but they establish bonds with brands that provide them with exactly what they need.
Target marketing helps businesses assess which segments of their audiences are potentially buying their products and prioritizes resources appropriately.
#3 Precision Planning
Once you decide your business’s target audience, there are many ways to capture further information of what your audiences want and need.
One way is known as generational marketing.
This marketing approach uses generational segmentation in marketing communication.
Based on Wikipedia, a generation is defined as a cohort of people born within a similar period and share an approximate age, economic, and demographics.
Furthermore, this group is determined by specific trends, activities, and developments. Many businesses practice this method to understand why people react differently even when they are close to age.
As business owners and marketers, sometimes acquiring customers can be a complex process.
We get their attention with content marketing using articles and videos. We nurture our customers through cycles of emails and newsletters, hoping they’ll be wooed and interested in our product.
Therefore, it’ll be best to focus on a specific demographic.
Hence, understanding who your target audience is and how they perceive your messages is critical for success.
How To Find Your Target Audience on Social Media: Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter, Linkedin
Social media can be a highly cost-effective way to reach your target audiences in a more customized manner.
So you should invest your time and learn to find which social media platforms your target audience spends their time. Doing so will most likely enable you to reach and engage your potential consumer.
But, how you ask?
Here’s the ultimate guide on how to find your target audience in different social media platforms.
1. Facebook
Facebook is one of the most popular social media sites Malaysia for marketing. With more than 2.5 billion active users logging into the platform at least once a day, it makes sense perfectly to be present on this platform.
It’s the best place for fun social updates and captivating videos; many have thought Facebook is a hub for paid ad targeting campaigns.
And thanks to the Facebook Audience Insight and Facebook Livestream feature, it has made it easy for every marketer to advertise on the platform.
Audience Insight tool
The Audience Insight tools allow you to:
- focus on the specific audience
- minimize net spend per conversion.
- give all-important insights about your target audience, including demographics, behavior, interests, lifestyle, hobbies, purchase history, and many more.
Facebook is a platform for socializing, and the user’s profile explains a lot about the user; this is what Audience Insights relies on. By looking at the Facebook groups the users join, what they share on the news feed, and what posts they liked, helps create a persona.
By utilizing Audience Insights to create ideal customer profiles precisely, you learn how to be better content creators to your users and where and what to promote your content to ensure it reaches them.
As you already know, there are an infinite number of ways through which you can determine an audience on social media platform Facebook. “Specific” does not clearly refer to the custom audience but rather a well-defined set of Facebook users.
Custom Lookalike Audiences
Custom and lookalike audiences can help identify your target audience, but advertisers seldom lack traffic and conversions to create them on social media sites as big as Facebook.
Usually, experienced marketers may have used them quite often to create lookalike audiences that they have saturated the existing audience. And that’s when customer demographics social media targeting becomes operational.
The social media targeting options you can use to define your target audiences using the Ads Manager are:
- Location
- Age groups
- Gender
- Same language
- Demographic data
- Similar interests
- Behaviors including spending power and patterns
- Fans or friends of fans of a Facebook page
The custom audience also allows you to target Facebook users according to:
- Ideal customer file
- Website traffic (as long as the Facebook Pixel is available on your site)
- App activity
- Engagement (exact action taken on either Facebook or Instagram)
Facebook Segmentation
You want to segment your campaign into many small sets to see which one performs better and then use that as a template for future ad sets. If we want to make a successful Facebook ad campaign and filter it down to the vital elements, the five key points would be:
- Always plan your campaigns
- Create an engaging and creative ad using an image or video by adding a captivating headline and ad text
- Offer a good product that people can’t refuse
- Target the correct audience so they’ll see the ad
- Bid, optimize, and create a campaign structure
Facebook allows you to get reasonable eyeballs on what you’re offering and encourages them through engaging content. It’s an excellent platform for brand awareness and strengthens your funnel.
It’s impossible to understand Facebook ads in a day. Still, with an understanding of audience creation and a precise social media targeting strategy from Facebook Ads Manager in place, you’ll be well on your way to paid social success.
You may be interested in: How to Use Facebook Events Manager to Advertise
2. TikTok
If you own a business, TikTok can be a perfect platform to introduce your brand. However, if you’re not familiar with TikTok, you might not know how to use it to market your business.
There has been some controversy with the app concerning data privacy, nevertheless, it continues to grow in popularity.
Many business owners have not taken the opportunity to figure out how TikTok can work as a marketing tool.
Maybe they think the platform is crowded with a millennial user base, and their target audience is not there.
But with more than 800 million active global users, the low-business competition presents a huge chance because you can reach many people at a relatively low cost.
Like many social channels, TikTok algorithms favor paid content.
You can use TikTok PPC (Pay-per-click) ads to engage users with content that demonstrates your brand value. By segmenting your audience, you can find trends amidst your buying personas.
This will help you produce TikTok advertising content that attracts your target audience, persuades them to participate, and connect with your community.
Brands Collaboration & Create Challenge
Triumphing with TikTok marketing comes down to creating exciting and entertaining content. If you think you can do that, people will likely watch and be engaged with your videos. This can result in the algorithm putting your content in front of more audiences.
Perhaps the easiest way to produce exciting business content for your TikTok profile is by adopting the same approach you’d use when brainstorming for blog post ideas. If you want to create an engaging blog post, you’d first need to think about some of the topics that intrigue your target audience. Alternatively, you can collaborate or partner with popular influencers to introduce your brand.
One of the fastest and most relevant ways to interact with your target audience on TikTok is to require your users to participate in challenges. Whether your business is interacting with your social media users via email, live chat, messages, or comments, you need a flawless TikTok engagements strategy.
Likes, comments, and follows may help boost your social presence on the platform. Challenges, on the other hand, allow you to test and evaluate existing ideas. The hashtag challenge is one of the approaches that many TikTok users would love to participate in.
SMART Customer Acquisition Goals
Targeting interests works well for advertisers who attempt to reach a target market. Without the capacity to find targets for the brands, ad spending can quickly go to waste. Without understanding your target audience, it would be hard to reach the demographic you wish to engage.
If young teens see early 30’s anti-aging skincare ads, the message might possibly be ill-received as it is not reaching the intended customer.
Advertisers who set objectives are 376 percent more likely to accomplish successful results than those who are not. This is because the SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals make it doable to track your progress.
It’s also vital to understand your UV (unique value proposition) to differentiate between you and your competitors in the eyes of your target audiences.
You can do this by studying your existing customer base. Figure out their online habits, buying behaviors, interests, and what influences their buying decision. Use predictive lead scoring to determine what causes these current customers to purchase from you.
3. Instagram
As with most social media platforms, defining the target audience is a crucial task every marketer has to perform to create an effective Instagram growth strategy.
Without understanding your target audience’s interest and what intrigues them, you might stay clueless about what type of content to produce.
In Instagram marketing, reaching your target audience at the right time is essential.
You don’t want to just copy a strategy done by others just because it works for them. Because your target audience might resonate differently.
It would be best to have your buyer personas to help narrow down your Instagram target audience. A clear plan of what your typical consumer looks like for your business would be helpful.
Recognize these questions
Who will use my product? What is my potential customer? Will my product and services solve their pain points?
Researching your competitor’s Instagram audiences helps you understand more about your target audiences.
Study what kind of content they’re sharing and what type of followers they have – this might give you a picture of how your Instagram’s audiences should look like.
When you’re doing your research, demographic insights into your Instagram audience can be helpful.
Go to your Insights on the Instagram app, and you’ll be able to see the three fundamental statistics on your followers: gender, age, and location.
This set of information is essential if you want to run a campaign, as you can create content based on this data.
Combine the data with your buyer persona, and you’ll have the information for your competitor research. And that’s how your Instagram audience should look like.
Audience Research
Audience research is also an important step to running a successful Instagram social media targeting. Another effective way to recognize your target audience is by doing some social listening.
You can’t be sure what’s trending amongst your audience if you do not communicate with them. And when you do not understand them, you can’t get them to engage with you.
You could make an Instagram Stories poll to ask relevant questions that will help you understand your audience better. Create questions like what type of content they want you to make. Keep them engaged or create a poll to discover their interests, likes and dislikes, shopping behavior, and more.
Leverage The use of Instagram Hashtags
Using the right Instagram hashtags can dramatically boost your reach on the platform too. But you need to know when to use them. Many have used the hashtags passively, and they did not get the traffic they wished for.
Instead, use a hashtag that is also used by your target audience. Your target audience’s interest should be similar to what you’re offering, so if you use the hashtags they follow, it’s likely they’ll find you!
4. Twitter
With over 145 million active daily social media users on the platform, Twitter is undoubtedly a solid platform to expand your marketing strategy.
The platform is a mother-lode of consumer insights, and the possibility to build your brand, drive sales and improve your target audience is at your fingertips.
There are various smart tools available that come in handy when it comes to connecting your business and your target audiences.
Once you can identify your target audience, you’ll be able to segment them to monitor and engage them more successfully.
Twitter Bios
One effective way to determine your target audience on Twitter is the target keyword in Twitter bios. For example, if you’re promoting an e-book for e-commerce in Malaysia. Using a few tools like Social Bros or Follower Wonk helps list down your targets.
This strategy allows you to search for profiles that are relevant to what you’re offering. So you don’t waste time following profiles that will not be interested in your product or services.
Twitter Pools
Twitter polls let you consider questions often asked by other users on Twitter. You can create your poll and ask questions to your audience and receive instant feedback.
Hashtag Usage in Twitter
Similar to Instagram and TikTok, Twitter users are also relying on hashtags to know what are the latest trends to follow. So create hashtags that might guide your audience to you, and once you finalize what hashtags to use, create a list of potential profiles that fit your criteria.
Then you need to gather all profiles you retrieve on Twitter based on keywords, locations, or hashtags and compile them into a list.
Now that you have the list, you can start utilizing it to drive your target audience to visit your profile. When you set your list to public and add a user to it, they’ll receive a notification saying you’ve added them to your list.
They may or may not click on your profile to check who you are and what you are doing. If they like what they see, they might follow you. To encourage them to click the follow button, make sure you create a catchy and meaningful title for your list.
5. Linkedin
An astounding 3.5 billion people are on social media every day and this number keeps increasing and is expected to hit 5 billion.
For many B2B marketers, having a reliable approach to reaching audiences at the right time with the proper message is essential.
LinkedIn makes the process a bit simpler by releasing fewer critical updates for reaching and engaging with your target audiences.
Finding the right audience for your marketing campaigns is pretty simple. All you need is to ask yourself who you like to engage.
Is your target audience categorized by geographic region, industry type, skill level, education, or other criteria?
It would be best if you used a combination of filters to identify the various audiences you would like to engage with unique and customized content.
Audience Targeting Capabilities
LinkedIn’s audience social media targeting capabilities are incomparable, especially for B2B marketers. Whether you choose a continent or metro region, location targeting helps you put your budget on places that your target audience will likely be.
You can target by adding specific company names or by defining the company industry and size. Or you can enter particular job titles or by specifying the company job description and skill level.
Linkedin Direct Content
The recent launch of Direct Content helps you determine the most relevant target audiences, while Sponsored Content lets you manage similar ads for various audiences. This will allow LinkedIn marketing investors to differentiate performance in real-time and optimize marketing campaigns instinctively.
Direct Sponsored Content allows you to execute different versions of the same ads for multiple buyer personas. This is exceptionally helpful for businesses that are targeting different types of customers. It also lets you compare the performance of your content with other target groups.
Click-Through-Rate
The first benchmark to monitor is your Click-Through Rate (CTR). It’s the total number of people who reacted to your LinkedIn ad (the number of clicks) divided by the number of impressions (the number of times the ad was seen).
Your CTR will show how interesting your ads are. And if your CTR has a high engagement rate, it means your current audience likes what you’re sharing and is willing to click on it. And, if your CTR is comparatively low, you might be missing something on how to attract your audiences.
Creating multiple campaigns that target the same persona helps you reach a much broader social network of people. This ensures you’re not missing out on valuable opportunities. Campaigns are the fundamental building blocks of LinkedIn Ads and LinkedIn Sponsored Content.
Conclusion
There you go, above are the guidelines on finding the right target audiences on social media and taking advantage of the valuable knowledge we share with you.
Identifying your audience allows your business to focus on marketing efforts and budget on the specific groups most likely to be interested in your product and services. That way, you’ll be generating business leads more effectively and affordably through different social channels.
Keep in mind that this does not mean making assumptions about the people you want to reach and engage – but rather doing in-depth research to learn more about who they are, where they come from, and their shopping behavior.
All social media networks have various characteristics in terms of use and user base, and the same applies to the ad targeting they provide.
If you’d like to learn more about crafting a social media marketing strategy that fits your business and brand, contact us today at One Search Pro.
When you have mastered how to understand your potential customer needs and communicate with them, you’ll eventually expand your reach by identifying critical audiences from different segments.
Contact us today to get in touch to discuss how to further improve your digital marketing strategy!
