A quick guide to target audiences
Defining and understanding your target audience is a core foundation to your social media strategy – and yet many businesses still don’t understand who their ideal customers are or where to find them.
It’s easy to assume that you should aim to share your message with EVERYONE on social media, but that’s a common (and maybe costly) mistake.
So let’s take an honest look at your business. Have you thought about who your customers might be? What matters to them? Why they might engage with your services? If you’re not sure, don’t worry. I’m here to take you on a whistlestop tour through target audiences.
Why target audiences are important
Identifying your key audience and understanding them can help you to reach potential clients who are likely to be interested in what you offer. It means you can focus your message on your target market – the people who are most likely to buy from you.
For people to become a supporter or customer on social media, you’re almost certainly going to have to share content that’s meaningful to them and which they relate to. And a broad-brush, ‘catch all’ approach just isn’t going to achieve that.
Instead, you need to understand who they are and what makes them tick, and then create targeted content for them at each stage of the customer journey. This way, you’ll connect at a deeper level, build stronger relationships and turn followers into customers or clients.
By knowing your target market, you can harness in-depth insights about them and the type of content they prefer, helping you to shape your content strategy and grow your business.
How to identify your target audience
The first step is to look carefully at your existing customer insights on the social media platforms you use. These will give you an idea of age range, gender, location and more.
It’s also important to look at your competitors so that you can benchmark and understand how customers interact with them. Do you want to attract a similar audience? Or do you want to target a slightly different type of client?
It’s also useful to remember that you can have more than one type of customer (and many businesses do!). If you’re a photographer, your audience might include both parents and C-level executives/decision-makers in larger businesses. Or if you’re in recruitment, you’ll have B2B (hiring) and B2C (applicant) audiences.
Understanding your target audience
Once you know who your target clients are, you can dig deeper and start to understand how they feel, think and behave. This means considering more than just demographics and industry sectors.
People make purchasing decisions based on their values and behaviours, and on how they see themselves and the world they live in. It’s time to get very specific and think about what their interests are, their ambitions, their personality, and what really matters to them.
How does (or would!) your service benefit that specific customer? How does it make their life better or easier? And how do they feel when that happens?
Understanding your target audience in more depth means you can make sure your messaging and content across social media reflects this, using a tone of voice to communicate core messages that speak directly to them and resonate with them.
Don’t forget to do this for all your different types of customers if you have more than one!
Next steps…
Now that you know the basics, it’s time to put your target audience research into action! Keep your target market in mind throughout your social media journey, from planning your content to engaging with others. And remember, your business changes and grows over time (as does your target audience) so you’ll need to revisit this piece of work regularly to check if it needs to be adjusted.
Good luck!
