Your target audience is your existing and potential customer or your intended audience or readership of a publication, advertisement, marketing message or social media post. It can also refer to your current and potential followers on a social network. Investing in marketing campaigns can help your business to reach customers and gain a following of loyal customers.
Your business need not be on a national television show to reach your target audience. Pitching your business to local news stations could result in placing your business in front of local customers that need your business.
To find your target audience, the first thing you need to do is a target audience analysis.
What Is Target Audience Analysis and Why Do You Need It?
A target audience analysis is a foundation for a cost-effective marketing strategy. It will enable you to pinpoint a specific audience that may be interested in your product or service.
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Your target audience analysis will assist you in crafting personalised content for particular customer personas.
Investing in a content creation template will help you create the proper posts for the right audience on your social media channels.
Your target audience analysis will make you more competitive by targeting a specific niche and improving your marketing message and conversion rates.
The target audience analysis will enable you to create content that connects with your target audience and helps them solve their actual problems. By so doing, you will create loyal customers and brand advocates.
How Do You Define and Classify Your Target Audience?
You can define your target audience according to their:
- Demographics (age, sex, race, location, occupation and religion).
- Psychographics (interests, activities, attitudes and opinions).
For B2B brands, you can classify your target audience according to their level of involvement in the decision-making process to purchase your product or service, such as users, initiators, influencers, buyers, gatekeepers, and decision-makers.
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What Is the Best Way to Identify Your Target Audience’s Pain Points?
As far as marketing is concerned, social media has evolved a lot through the years from just a means for business promotions to a medium that can give you valuable insights into your target audience’s pain points.
Today, every type of business requires a robust and live social media platform backed by a well-planned strategy to enable them to identify their target audience’s pain points and provide solutions.
These days, brands use their presence on social media as a marketing strategy to provide a perpetual boost to stress their sales and promotions on a large scale.
How Can You Use Social Media to Identify Your Target Audience Pain Points?
According to the DMA, social media is one of the best ways to reach prospective customers and is expected to grow to 24% of marketing budgets by 2021.
Statista found that in 2018, 52% of website traffic worldwide was generated through mobile phones. And it is safe to assume that a substantial amount of that traffic goes to social media platforms.
Create an action plan for your social media marketing campaign. Each social media platform demands a specific strategy that optimises your action plan while gauging the input and answers that convert into amplified business for your brand.
Most social media platforms allow brands to use ads to sponsor their businesses to get them in front of the right audience and promote their content.
Let us take the following social networks as examples. We shall cover each of the significant social platforms/social channels to see how we can use social listening to target our current or potential customers.
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With about 2 billion users worldwide, Facebook is a powerhouse for gaining insights into your target audience. Facebook has a treasure trove of information on its users priceless to advertisers and marketers.
It is the most widely used platform, with 74% of users visiting the site daily and 51% visiting multiple times a day.
Recent statistics show that based on the total population (not just internet users), a full 30% of the Facebook ad audience is between the ages of 25 through 34.
Compared with other social media platforms, Facebook has achieved an even more impressive percentage of mindshare. Brands active on Facebook by posting content (e.g. a blog post) on their Facebook page will create awareness and brand consciousness in the target audiences. Thus, these brands would be top of mind in their target market when making a purchase.
Your Facebook also provides native analytics tools (similar to Google Analytics) that provide valuable insights that help you identify your target audience and their pain points.
Besides the regular demographic insights, study your data to discover which posts (i.e. links, photos or videos) attract the most engagement (Reactions, Comments & Shares) from your target audience on average.
A detailed analysis of your top-performing posts on Facebook can help you find clues to your target audience pain points.
Through their advertising tools, you can create custom or lookalike audiences to help you learn more about your current audience, your social media target audience and other target customers.
Today, every type of business requires a robust and live social media platform backed by a well-planned strategy to enable them to identify their target audience's pain points and provide solutions. Click To TweetAnother place on Facebook to find valuable insights into your target audience’s pain points is through relevant Facebook Groups. However, finding the right group can be quite a challenge because spam overruns many groups these days.
If you’re using your personal Facebook profile as part of your marketing strategy and want to find your audience online, use Facebook’s search bar to find groups that match your ideal customer’s interests. Also, use the data from your Google Analytics to see the impact your efforts on Facebook have on your website.
Twitter’s native analytics is another critical of using social media to identify your target audience pain points. Focus your attention on data from your top-performing tweets and your target audience.
Statistics also say that 37% of Twitter users are between 18 and 25, while 25% are 30-49 years old.
Interestingly, Twitter usage drops as age increases. And 36% of American users are aged between 18-29, 22% of 30-49 years, and 18% of 50-64 years.
Although these data are from Twitter users in the United States, this does not mean that you can’t use them as a guide to identifying your target audience and their pain points. Be creative in how to apply the data from your Twitter analytics.
Twitter is a perfect platform to share your blog posts and other relevant content. It is an excellent platform to engage in conversations with real customers. With 500 million tweets per day sent from Twitter, a business can develop relationships with existing or potential customers and turn the interactions into consumers.
According to the Content Marketing Institute, 82% of B2B marketers named LinkedIn the most effective social media platform for achieving their content marketing goals.
LinkedIn provides easy access to prospects and clients. LinkedIn offers detailed analytics through its company pages and its advertising platform.
This data derived from LinkedIn is priceless for B2B business owners, particularly in their marketing and advertising campaigns.
Your LinkedIn company page analytics will help you identify your page visitors demographics segmented by their job functions, seniority and industry.
Your visitors’ demographics, together with data on your post engagements, will enable you to understand your target audience and their pain points.
Ways to Reach Your Target Market on Social Media
According to Bright Local, 91% of 18-34-year-old consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Venngage also conducted a study and found that 90% of marketers are frustrated with their lead generation. Each social network has its unique effect on the audiences, led by leveraged search traffic.
Other social media platforms, like Instagram, Snapchat, and Pinterest, majorly build a robust online presence. Instagram is used by 38% of women in the United States and 26% of men. 47% of US teens prefer Snapchat over Facebook, and 24% think it’s better than Instagram.
However, to reach the right people your brand might interest, you need to use the right hashtags in your social media posts.
These various social media platforms provide insights into your target audience, which you can use with your buyer personas to deduce their pain points.
According to this article, if you partner with relevant influencers from your niche, you can reach potential customers interested in your brand or niche. A well-managed and executed influencer marketing campaign can help your brand reach out to more people.
Once you’ve gathered all these insights, use them in crafting your social media campaigns. Use your social media campaigns to drive more traffic from these various social networks to your website, app, or physical store.
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By directing social media users to landing pages on your website for your specific campaigns, you will make it easier to discover the pain points of your target audience and provide solutions through your products or service.
If you want to grow fans and followers, you need to communicate and connect with your existing fanbase/customers by focusing on your posts, tweets, comments, shares, likes and mentions.
The accomplishment of your marketing and advertising campaign depends upon how well your brand understands its target audiences and measures their traits.
Use your social media channels to influence your client base by highlighting their interests, desires and needs in your advertising and marketing campaigns.
These days reaching out to your target audience via social media is an absolute necessity.
Being present and active on all dominant social media platforms relevant to your target audience with a fair amount of followers is vital.
A successful brand efficiently connects with its consumers and influencers to maximise its presence on social media.
With the rise of effective brand marketing by influencers on Instagram, it’s clear that your existing and potential target audiences look up to them for advice and opinions.
Therefore, brands should readily invest in Instagram influencers that play a significant role in amplifying the fans and creating hype across social media platforms.
With social media, it’s imperative to track your brand’s progress with the aid of Google analytics to get vital insights on how your brand is affecting its target audience.
Tracking how your brand is doing on several social media sites helps test the effectiveness of your strategy and what improvisation it needs.
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Conclusion
Every business goes through phases of trial and error and their moments of glory. Thus, as a business owner, you should always be open to attempting, improvising, and accepting new trends for your digital and social media marketing campaigns.
These days, reaching your target audience through social media is essential in ensuring the survival of your business.
Do you have questions about this topic that I did not answer in this article? Do all these sound too complicated for you to handle? Outsource your digital marketing and social media marketing efforts to us.
Schedule a consultation today. I’ll be glad to answer all your questions.
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