As of 2020, there were approximately 3.5 billion users on the internet. Those numbers go a long way in telling us that social media can play a significant role in the growth of our businesses. So, no matter your profession, you need a solid social media presence to back it up nowadays.
However, social media marketing comes with various responsibilities. A major one is that you have to build consistency because you would lose followers as quickly as you gain them without it. Additionally, your level of commitment to your preferred social media platform(s) gives users an impression of your brand’s credibility level.
Nonetheless, you shouldn’t start a social media page without being equipped with the correct information. So, in this article, you will learn how to attract your target audience and keep them. But why do you even need a target audience in the first place? Let’s find out!
Why you need to define your audience on social media
Knowing how to use social media is not equivalent to driving leads and sales. If you haven’t pinpointed your target, you will create content for people who don’t value you and your message. So, here are a few reasons why you need a particular audience before building your social media presence:
1. You will reduce price buyers
Price buyers are people who expect you to sell your products or services at cheap amounts. They don’t value your offers. Therefore, people like them are not valuable to your business. Knowing your specific audience will help you weed them out.
2. Your marketing will become more effective.
Defining your audience will make you streamline your posts on social media to suit them. In turn, the tailored content you put out will help you speak to your customers in terms they want to hear and close more deals.
3. You will satisfy your customers better.
When you have your target audience as your prominent followers, you can focus on satisfying your customers instead of convincing the wrong group to buy from you.
Thus, it is not wrong to say that a more specific target audience will drive more sales. But now that you know why you need a target audience, how can you attract them?
How to attract a new target audience on social media
Attracting a new target audience is tasking because you have to give people incentives to follow you. This time around, your reasons must be more profound than the quality of your pictures or the location. Since you are using your social media account for marketing, the quality of content you dish out will determine if the relevant audience will listen to you.
So, let’s find out how to attract the right audience on social media.
1. Establish your target audience
In the previous section, we discussed why you need to define your audience. However, the fact remains that you will keep marketing to the wrong people if you don’t know your customers. There is a myth that every business with a social media page will get more sales. But, there isn’t as much emphasis laid on optimizing their page to appeal to the audience. So business owners that believe they just need to get on social media to sell start out motivated, but as they get no leads, their pages die.
There are billions of social media users; therefore, you have to identify those relevant to your brand to get the best out of social networking platforms. And, you can do this by defining your audience.
To make it easy for you, here are some critical questions you need to answer.
- Does your business appeal to a specific gender?
- Does your business appeal to any age group better?
- Does your business appeal to low-income, mid-income, or high-income earners? Or, does it target people with money problems or those with enough cash to spare?
- What are your ideal customers’ values?
If you want to appeal to the right market, you need this level of profiling. With it, you would create content on social media that will consistently resonate with your audience.
Let us put this into perspective.
A digital marketing tool like Conversion.ai would not target architects because it is not an architectural tool. Instead, it creates ad copies to target content creators, social media managers, copywriters, and other related fields. Similarly, If ESPN launches a product, they won’t target people with no interest in sports; they will direct their content to active sports lovers. Finally, if you already have a social media audience but plan to enter a new market, the strategy you used for the former one won’t work. So, you have to start researching anew using those questions mentioned above as a guide.
2. Discover their preferred social networks
As the saying goes, different strokes for different folks. Likewise, the principle that everybody has different preferences applies to social media. So, after defining your audience, find out which social platform they prefer.
According to Pew research, male users outnumber female users on platforms like Reddit, YouTube, WhatsApp, Linked In, and Twitter. However, on Facebook and Pinterest, the number of females far supersedes males. So the chances that your target audience would be on many of these platforms are high, but there will be specific platforms that the bulk of your customers prefer.
If you want more streamlined social media marketing, you should find which social media platform your audience uses more. When you have done that, you can optimize your social media strategy to fit their needs. You can find your target audience’s preferred social channels after defining their characteristics like age range and gender.
3. Establish your audience size
The size of your audience is an essential factor for finding a new audience. Why? Because it will help you create content that would appeal to many people instead of a select few. So, to determine your audience, you can utilize the social platform’s Ads Manager, which is typically an ideal choice. It can choose a myriad of demographics that helps determine the number of people you need or want to market to.
Let’s use Facebook as an example. If you are looking for workers aged 25 – 31 who reside in Atlanta, love burgers, and have a wage cap of at least $1 000, Facebook will provide you with the number of people that fit your specifications. We recommend you use data gotten from categorizing your target audience as the parameters on your Ads manager.
Note that it is not ideal to put a broad range as your audience size when running Facebook ads. A range of 1000 – 250,000 is too much for small businesses. Therefore, if you find yourself closer to any of the two extremes, you can streamline your data. The ideal spot is typically between both limits, depending on your business type. If you don’t target appropriately, you will spend money on ads and get no result.
4. Create customer surveys
An effective strategy you can utilize to attract a new target audience is asking your current customers questions. You can create polls, questionnaires, or surveys and ask your customers to take them. The insights from these surveys would help you learn new things about their preferences, which you couldn’t have discovered personally.
The way you ask the questions should differ for each audience type, but the questions should be the same. You can use Google forms, survey monkey, or a poll on Facebook to get answers.
So, here are some possible questions you can ask in a customer survey:
- What are their best pages online?
- What is their preferred social media platform(s), and how often do they visit it/ them?
- What kind of accounts do they find engaging?
- What are their kinds of favorite sites to visit?
- What blogs or podcasts do they find more appealing?
- What is their favorite kind of content? The type that keeps them glued.
The answers to the questions will give you an overview of their online behavior. Furthermore, you would get a deeper insight into their preferences to help you discover more people like them, create content that appeals to them, and ultimately gain new customers. Note that it is up to you to structure your questions anyhow you deem fit. But don’t make the questions seem like an interrogation; if not, you may not get the answers you need.
5. Utilize social ads
Another effective means of finding a new target audience is by running ads on social platforms. Many social media platforms allow entrepreneurs to promote their businesses through sponsored ads. As a business owner, you should leverage the opportunity.
Sometimes, it isn’t easy to find your audience through organic means. So using paid ads to drive traffic can help you get your content in front of your target audience, and your business would reach its goals. However, it is ideal to invest in ads on social media platforms that your target audience prefers. If you recall the second step on this list, you will find how different people use different social media channels. You can use it as a guide to determine which social network your audience loves.
If you are running paid ads, you should use organic, unique, and plagiarism-free content to fuel them. Most people are annoyed about how ads appear on social media. But, if you provide them with valuable content, they will gravitate to you. Therefore, always use highly engaging content according to your analytics to increase your CTR (click-through rate).
6. Use relevant hashtags.
The use of hashtags has grown significantly since the last decade. We can attribute this growth to the fact that hashtags are easy to remember, and they are also an effective way to stay up to date with the latest trends, events, topics, and questions within any industry. Additionally, the proper use of hashtags can help you get your content to reach a broader audience on social media.
Whenever you utilize hashtags, you increase your chances of getting organic leads because your post will pop up to people interested in it. Hashtags are a great way to optimize your social media pages and gain better exposure. However, don’t abuse them, instead streamline the hashtags you use. Research the most popular hashtags in your niche, find the top two, and use them as often as necessary.
So we can say that the more specific hashtags you use, the better your traffic. Additionally, you can create hashtags for your brand; that way, users will attribute them to your business. But, make sure the hashtags are relevant to your industry, company and products.
7. Collaborate with influencers
Have you ever patronized or discovered a new brand because your favorite celebrity endorsed it? If so, then you know the power of influencer marketing. Whether people admit it or not, personal brands can affect corporate brands, like in the case of Coca-Cola and C.Ronaldo.
You must plan and create a budget before attempting influencer marketing. You should also do some research. During your research, here are a few things to understand.
- You must find out which platform talks more about your industry. You can do so by social listening.
- Your budget plays a significant role in influencer marketing. The bigger an influencer’s social media following, the higher you will spend to get them to work with you.
- You should work with influencers relevant to your brand, as random celebrities may not help you reach your target irrespective of their popularity.
Over 30% of consumers rely on influencers to make a purchase decision. So, leveraging the reach that influencers have will position your brand to meet people who need what you have. Finally, utilizing influencer marketing will give you direct access to their followers, giving your brand more exposure.
How to keep your target audience on social media engaged
Now that you know why and how to attract your target customers, keeping them is the next thing to learn. You see, the fact that you could reach your goals doesn’t mean you should rest on your laurels. As we said, it is easy to lose followers as quickly as you gain them.
So if you have managed to reach your target audience, here are some engagement strategies to keep them so that they don’t leave you for your competitors:
1. Host contests
Contests are an excellent strategy for increasing activities on your page. They motivate people to like and follow your pages, especially when incentives are attached. So, you can organize “comment to win,” “follow to win,” or “tag to win” contests. You can also message participants who didn’t win to thank them for participating.
Promote the contests everywhere else, including your email lists and other social networks. Furthermore, don’t give prizes that are not related to your brand. If you do that, you will attract people only interested in the award and not your brand.
2. Include images and videos
People love images, sometimes more than text. So, integrate visuals like colorful images or graphics with every post you make. You can utilize free graphic design tools to create visuals related to your content.
Videos are also one of the most engaging content types; it’s no wonder YouTube has so many users. So, leverage videos to increase engagement on your pages. But ensure you post your videos directly on the platform instead of leaving a link to an external medium. Then, when many people view the videos, it can bring about increased engagement, reach, and exposure for your brand.
3. Be open to feedback, and respond to messages
Nobody likes being ignored, and when you make customers think that you don’t care about their opinions by ignoring messages, you will lose credibility. In that pile of texts you are missing, you may have a client that would have given you a big break. And if not, what kind of customer relationship are you building by ignoring messages?
People are likelier to work with brands they perceive as nice. However, if you don’t believe that, here are statistics for you: 83% of Facebook users and 71% of Twitter followers expect a response the same day they ask a question. Additionally, 32% of Twitter users expect a response within 30 minutes. These numbers point to the fact that you should give your followers a fantastic user experience on your page by listening to their needs and swiftly responding.
4. Publicly appreciate active followers
Publicly recognize and appreciate those who retweet, mention, and selflessly promote your brand on Twitter. Then, thank users who follow you, like your posts, and actively comment on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. All of these actions will make your online community feel like a part of the brand. It would spur your audience to do more, be more active, and share your posts more. Don’t forget that appreciation is a core business practice.
In Summary
Social media is a good breeding ground for long-standing and new businesses. On it, you will get the chance to meet different types of people that will facilitate your business growth. But, unfortunately, you will also meet those who are hell-bent on dragging you down.
Thankfully, you can avoid this unwanted attention by knowing your specific audience and tailoring your efforts for them. If you already have an audience but want to expand your reach, you can do that by following the tips above. So, include them in your strategy and watch your business become a significant competitor in your industry.
