Social media is a powerful platform for any kind of business starting from startups to established firms to meet larger audiences and to promote their business product or services. And because of this fact, we can see many businesses running their own social profiles but have no notion of how the platform works for the business.
They simply create a profile, share social media posts, and expect people to find them and reach out for their products or services without making any effort to reach their target audience. But, We can also see many businesses performing brilliantly on social media. This is because they know the importance of finding their potential customers and make a good effort in finding their audience and gently marketing their products or services with them on social media.
Using social media platforms is a great way for content marketing. But how can a business find its target audience on social media?
Before moving on to this question, let’s take a look at what is the target audience.
What is Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people having specified behavior, psychographics, and demographic. You should be able to know the type of customers whom you wants to sell your products to. Without knowing them, it is impossible to find the right audience.
A specific group of people who might be interested in buying your product or services and who you focus on with your marketing effort is simply called the target audience. Speaking it with an example: If you own a high clothing fashion brand- you would particularly focus on women of age 25-45 who have a high passion for luxury goods.
Or if you own a business related to educational toys, your target audience will be children, teachers, or mothers. You can put a real effort into marketing if you know the right people as they are the ones who are interested in your products or services.
Speaking of the target audience, people often get confused with the target market. So let us look into the differences.
What is the difference between Target Audience and Target Market?
Though the target audience and target market are used reciprocally, they have their own differences. As we discussed, the target audience is a specific group of people who will be interested in your product or service. On the other hand, a target market is a larger people group to which a company reaches out with its product or services. The target market comprises not only the target audience but the other bunch of people who will be interested in the products are services as well.
Speaking with an example for the target market: You own a business for men’s sneakers- Here your target audience will be men of age 18-45 but the target market here might include their wives, parents, friends, or even members of their family who will be interested in the product to gift them.
How to know your Target audience?
Some of the questions you might want to ask yourself in finding the target audiences are:
- Are you looking for a specific gender or targeting both males and females?
- What is the kind of income your target audiences have? Are you looking for people with spare money or the ones who tend to have money issues?
- What age group people are you targeting?
- Lastly, what value does your target audience commonly have?
Getting answers to these questions makes it easy to find the right audience and thereby you can share interesting content with them. Without the ideal customers, there is no point in sharing the content as they make no interest in them.
If you have a profile with many followers or current customers, there are options in social media such as questionnaires and polls available in your social media posts. These options enable you to ask the necessary questions to understand the preferences and needs of the people who will buy your products.. You can also take a step ahead in asking your customers to share about themselves, their passion, and their interests to make a lasting customer relationship – which is a key factor in your business growth.
How to Find Social Media Target Audience?
Some of the ways in finding target customers from social media sites are as follows:
- Which social media sites are widely used by your potential customers?
- Taking surveys from existing customer
- Narrow down your audience to different segments
- Make use of Facebook Ads Manager by creating a data file custom audience
- Finding the target audience and connecting with them
- Creating exciting content that will be loved by your target customers
Which social media sites are widely used by your potential customers?
As we all know the most prominent social media sites are:
The above said platforms contain millions of users and not every one of them frequently uses all the platforms. Based on a specific audience, they tend to use mainly one platform. Everyone doesn’t have interest and the time to use all the social media sites regularly and people with specific tastes tend to use the same platforms. It thus becomes essential for you to find the platform that is frequently used by your potential audience.
According to social media data research, YouTube is the most used social media platform, and next to it comes Facebook. We can also figure out that males spend more time on Youtube, Linkedin, Twitter, WhatsApp, and Reddit and females use Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. If you are looking for a younger audience, you can focus on platforms such as YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. On the other hand, if you are looking for an older audience, they tend to use Facebook and Youtube.
Taking surveys from existing customer
Your existing customers are the best examples to find your target audience. If you have a customer base on social media sites, make use of them by taking surveys from them to get a deeper insight into what you are looking for.
To get valuable information you can ask them questions such as the type of social media site that they would love to hang out on or the type of content they want to read or watch etc. To know more about their interest and passion, you can ask them about their preferred social media profile or YouTube channels.
You can also take initiative for email survey campaigns to get more information from your subscribers and ask them o join you by sharing your profiles.
Narrow down your audience to different segments
Once you gain the results from the surveys and questionnaires, you will be able to narrow down the audience to different segments. This way it makes it easy to find the potential ones and share the relevant content and information with them regarding your product or services.
By narrowing it down, you will be able to determine the estimated size of your potential sectors so that you don’t have to put the effort into all of them and help in finding your clear niches. Influencer marketing these days helps businesses to an extent, so find and contact influencers from your niche to gain more potential audiences.
Make use of Facebook Ads Manager by creating a data file custom audience
One of the best ways to find a target audience across social media sites is by using Facebook Ads Manager to create a custom audience based on a customer database. This becomes useful for Facebook and Instagram platforms.
After developing the custom audience based on your existing customers, it becomes easy to create look-a-like groups of people who tend to have an interest in your product but are not your customers yet. These are the ones you should focus on reaching out your social media content.
Finding the target audience and connecting with them
Once you get to know your target audience, you should make a real effort to connect with them by asking them to make contact with you on preferred platforms. In the case of Facebook, using Facebook Ads Manager will help you in finding your existing customers and look-a-like customer on that platform. This can also be accomplished by working with CRMs as part of social media marketing.
Creating exciting content that will be loved by your target customers
Now that you know your target audience. But it becomes pointless if you don’t make an effort for them to notice you. Thus, it is essential for you to create interesting social media content for them to notice you.
They should visit your profile often because of the quality of the content that you post. It shouldn’t be always regarding sales which makes them find you less interesting in your profile. Depending on the people some of them would love a good real blog post but some of them need funny videos or pictures to take an interest.
You should also make your audience engage with you by asking them to participate in questionnaires, and surveys or even asking them their opinion or experiences. By posting amazing content you can reach out to many other potential customers who did not become your customers yet through social media platforms.
Wrapping-Up:
Social media is a great platform to meet your target audience and to market your product or services if you know how it works. It becomes useless if you don’t make an effort to meet the potential ones. The above-mentioned strategies are some of the best ways in finding your customers among the millions of users on the platform. Take a look into the social media algorithm to reach out to more audiences who will be interested to buy your product or services.
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