How to Find Your Target Audience on Social Media?

Target Audience on Social Media: Social media marketing is the most effective and powerful way to connect today. It is like a helping resort for businesses of any size to grab their client’s attention and bring advanced conversions.

The potential customers are already interacting with brands through social media, and if a company is not speaking directly to its audience through social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, they’re really dropping out!

Precise social media marketing strategies can bring remarkable success to a business, creating strong brand loyalists and even driving leads and sales.

Guide to Find Target Audience on Social Media

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Before we get into details of social media marketing and understand ways to reach the target audience let’s quickly brush up on what marketing is.

“Marketing is an administrative and social process through which individuals and groups obtain what they need and desire by the generation, offering and exchange of valuable products with their equals”

~Philip Kotler

At its most basic, marketing search for the match for the company’s products and services to customers who want those products. The process of matching product to customer ultimately guarantees profitability.

Marketing starts by seeking answers from a consumer – Who they are, what they want, and what they care about. Marketing starts with a question.

“Business is known for only two functions – marketing and innovation.”

~ Milan Kundera

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”

~ Peter F. Drucker

Let’s know how to Tap Your Target Audience on Social Media

Since business is made of marketing and innovation, and marketing is about strong customer understanding, therefore marketing is the job of every employee.

There’s no one-size-fits-all when executing a marketing strategy. Every company will have its own version that will deliver the results being aimed for. A good strategy focuses on understanding the target audience, knowing what the customers need and deciding the best possible way to deliver it on. The best-known marketing tool for the same is STP – Segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

• What age groups are you trying to reach?
• What’s their average income?
• What are their common values?

The STP model is the most important concept in marketing and is the absolute key to serving a market successfully. STP involves three activities: segmentation, targeting, and positioning. Marketers segment markets and identifies prominent segments to target, before developing appropriate positioning strategies and allocating resources to prioritize marketing activities.

The application of the STP model has become more popular because of the substantial increase in mature markets, greater diversity in customer needs, and the ability to reach niche segments.

Read More: Social Media Promotion – 11 Effective Ways to Boost Your Brand

1. Segmentation

Market segmentation refers to the division of larger audiences into identifiable and distinct groups (segments) depending upon the business offerings. Each of these segments shows some of the common characteristics and needs and exhibits similar responses to marketing actions.

Different segmentation criteria can be used for dividing the market, including demographic, geographic, psychographic and behavioral variables.

2. Targeting

It consists of a set of buyers/customers who directly or indirectly possess common needs. The job of a business is to identify these users having similar characteristics and target them effectively to enhance the overall sale.

3. Positioning

It is about making your target audience know exactly how the company or organization is different from its competition.

Benefits of using STP Model –

• Improves the company’s competitive position
• Gives new wings to the company’s marketing strategies (including targeted advertising, new product development, and brand differentiation)
• Helps in identifying market growth opportunities by identifying new customers or product uses
• Effective and efficient allocation of organizations resources to target market segments which ensures the higher return on investment (ROI)

STP model ensures to focus on target customers to ensure clarity in providing solutions to their needs and demands.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is a form of internet marketing that essentially requires creating and sharing content on social media networks to achieve marketing and branding goals. Marketers use social media marketing for different activities like posting texts, updating images, videos, and other content that drives audience engagement.

Social media is a long term project and is not ending anytime soon. With every minute, it is shaping new strategies and tactics. At the same time, it is controlling the way in which local businesses interact with their customers.

The fact is, social media has brought people closer than ever before. And, when people are able to connect and communicate strongly, opportunities arise. This specifically is beneficial for business owners.

As a business owner, social media can connect and helps in knowing your audience in brand new ways. However, it works only if they can find the people they’re trying to reach.

Traditional Marketing Mediums

Common traditional marketing mediums including radio, TV commercials and print ads have always been costly mediums for businesses. But, through digital platforms and social media marketing, companies or brands can connect with their target customers for free or at a negligible cost. Hence, lowering marketing costs substantially.

Most of the small businesses have financial constraints, limited capital; therefore, they are very careful in choosing medium and type of marketing strategies. With a limited marketing budget, it becomes imperative that the budget is spent judiciously to get the most for your money.

Marketing through social media is one of the most adaptable and cost-effective strategies for small businesses to reach their target audience and ensure increased sales over time.

Benefits of Social Media Marketing

• Improved Customer Insights –
  Businesses get a chance to have a better understanding of the customers by letting them share their insights, letting them know that the brand is listening. It also helps them to see what potential customer’s opinions are and to network with them as well.
• Better Customer Service –
  Social media helps businesses to respond to customer grievances, questions, and concerns immediately. Assuring customers about the prompt resolution of their problems.
• Cost-Efficient –
  When a business has a limited or fixed marketing budget, they turn out to social media marketing, as it is one of the most cost-efficient ways to market and promote the business.
• Brand Awareness –
  Social Media Marketing helps in increasing brand awareness among customers as businesses can create awareness by building a strong positive image.
• Sales –
  Increased exposure through social media helps in driving higher traffic to the company resulting in more conversion of potential customers to actual customers.

Famous Social Media Platforms

• Facebook is a popular free social networking site. Here users make their profile to upload photos and videos. The messenger app is used to send messages and keep in touch with friends, family, and colleagues. Businesses and individual users use this platform to create their own Facebook pages and promote their businesses, brands, and services. There are 2.07 billion monthly active Facebook users with an increase of 16% increase year over year.
• Twitter is a famous microblogging social networking website that allows registered users to write their messages through short posts called tweets. There are 330 million active Twitter users.
• LinkedIn is a professional social networking site designed for the business community, professionals, managers, etc. LinkedIn has 467 million members connected. Essentially, this site allows registered users to connect and make a network of people they know and trust professionally.
• Instagram, the fast-growing social media platform, is a place where the registered users can share their images, stories and can also promote their business. Instagram has 800 billion monthly active users. It is now being used by many brands to promote their products, target their prospects/customers and drive real social value.

How to Reach Your Desired Target Audience on Social Media?

Now that we understand the importance of product placement and the role social media plays in business growth. Let’s now try to find out the most effective ways to reach the target audience. Social media is highly effective for business strategies because there are so many people who are using it.

Statista (online portal for statistics) estimates that there are 2.7 billion social media users around the world, and the number is increasing with every passing year. Social apps and their followers and users are not going anywhere. Hence resulting to be a resource for brands to grow their audiences and reach their target customers or markets.

Christopher Newman, a professor of marketing, says, “Too often marketers create a campaign first, and then try to identify a target market they hope will be receptive to it”.  It doesn’t work this way. Most important is to find out who your social media target audience is and reach there to market to them.

To be able to pull in consumers, there is a need to find out who they are and go where they are.

Below are 10 tips to help in reaching the desired goal –

1. Identifying the Target Audience

The most important first step in figuring out who desires to buy a product or service is to identify the existing customers. Understanding and defining characteristics of the existing customer base can help in reaching more people who can fit the same mold.

Seeking answers to the following questions can help to reach the right audience:

1. What are the age groups that you are trying to reach?
2. What’s their average income?
3. What are their common values?
4. What is their common interest?

2. G’SOT in Social Media Objectives

Understanding the difference between goals, strategy, objectives, and tasks – also known as G’SOT.

• Goals: These are the broad social media outcomes.
• Strategy: The approach that will take to accomplish the goal.
• Objectives: These are measurable steps that are required to achieve the strategy.
• Tactics: These are very important for a marketer as it involves the tools or tasks to reach the right audience

When you are clear with the difference, it will essentially help you to strategize effectively and reach your target audience.

3. Survey the Customers

To be able to get full information, it’s necessary to ask people the right questions. Surveys are a big factor in content marketing best practices. It is always a good idea to survey the real customers and find out which social networks they prefer. As a part of your JotForm Survey Maker, ask the existing  customers the following questions:

1. What is your favorite social media site?
2. Do you regularly read blogs? (please, name them)
3. What people do you follow on social?

Google Forms or Type Form can be used for collecting the data.

4. Determine the Target Audience Size

On social media platforms, you can find a search option which when efficiently used can help you find the right target audience (e.g., Twitter’s Advanced Search, LinkedIn allows us to search by names, keywords, email addresses, and more).

Facebook’s Business Manager is one such popular tool that helps you to estimate the size of the targeted audience. Moreover, its unique features help you to conduct market research. All you need to do is to select some of the essential key factors including gender, state or city, area of interest. This will give you a picture of how large is your audience.

Another option is to start by targeting a narrower niche, testing different marketing strategies, and gradually presenting the content to a broader audience.

A small target audience initially could be discouraging, however, consider changing the offers to expand the audience.

When planning to deploy Twitter, you can use popular tools like Followerwonk, TweetReach, Twazzup, Twitonomy. Another important tool is Hootsuite which will help in managing multiple platforms from a single window.

5. Social Media Audit

An old saying “Keeping your friends close but your enemies closer to beat the competition.”

Conduct a social media audit of the brand’s social channels compared to two or three competitors. You can even pick non-competing brands for inspiration and aspiration. Compare content, engagement, frequency, audience size, visuals, video use, tone, and customer service messaging. Most important is the response rate.

according to the State of Social 2018 report by Buffer and Social Media Today both small and large businesses nowadays measure the ROI of social media advertising by keeping a track of engagement. To understand what exactly is engagement getting the Google Analytics and the social media acquisition reports can come in handy.

6. Connect with Your Customers

After receiving and analyzing the survey results, next is to leverage that knowledge to build a stronger brand presence on social media. Strong content isn’t enough to get people to follow. A well thought out content plan and create a social media content calendar, including posts for festivals/holidays, sales, special offers, and other events are required to be prepared.

Carefully studying the time of day users is most active and scheduling posts accordingly is a must. However, brands should be ready and available to answer users’ questions at any time of day, to ensure a constant presence. Promoting the business on social media is not easy owing to dynamic platforms and user trends.

7. Utilize Industry Hashtags

Since the last decade, almost every type of audience has made hashtags as a buzzword on social media platforms. They find it helpful to stay in contact with what is trending, latest events, common topics and questions prevailing within the industry.

They’re also good at getting the content in front of a larger audience by using them in social media posts. Anyone who looks up to that hashtag can see content posted with it, which helps the brand in gaining more exposure and at the same time, makes it easy to find a new target audience.

8. Invest in social media ads

Most social media platforms are now an important channel to shoot ads and promote their businesses to reach the right audience and promote their content. Businesses are increasingly taking advantage of this strategy to ensure their strong reach and boost visibility. Sometimes finding the audience organically is more difficult than anticipated and paid ads can help in ensuring the right traffic needed for the business.

9. Come up with Interesting Content

The target customer may be well known by the marketer, but that will be of little value use until it is designed interestingly to ensure the target audience takes notice of the brand. The content to be created and shared must be interesting for prospective buyers.  Ideally, the selection of content should be a mix of curated content and original content on the topics that interest them with an occasional promotion, too.

The social pages should be inspirational to prospective audiences. Prospective customers should visit the page because of the content created and shared.

10. Ask Questions

Every brand is looking for an answer to the question “Why my posts are not engaging?” You should also ask yourself whether you reaching them with the right content!

Also, keep a close eye on what others are doing and check why your brand is not initiating similar activities which is generally preferred by the audience. When you start asking the right questions, it will help you to pull in like-minded people resulting in newly acquired target audiences.

The Last Note

In order to, Formulating the right social media marketing strategy which is one of the most productive approaches to strike the target audience. Due to increased awareness, many of the buyers come to social media platforms and interact with brands, hence, using the right channels to find the target market is sure to boost brand awareness.

Using data to make up to date decisions about the social media marketing strategy will ensure that the right audience is targeted.