How to Attract a New Target Audience on Social Media
What everybody— small businesses, influencers, marketers— needs is a strategy for finding their perfect social audiences. Here, we outline a few non-negotiable steps you must take if you want to attract the right audience to your businesses on social media. These will work for you whether you already have an audience or you are new to social media.
Fact: Every business' audience is present and can be found on social media.
Myth: All you need to do to get the right audience is to have a social media page and run a few ads.
There are 2.5 billion monthly active users on Facebook. This number stands at over 1 billion on Instagram, 1.9 billion on Youtube, and hundreds of millions for most other major social media platforms. This is a considerable number of people waiting to be converted.
But while many businesses and marketers have a social media presence, many of them do not know what to do with it. They start with a lot of zeal and little to no planning, so by the time they hit disillusionment — and they always do — they just let their social accounts die a slow and painful death.
Usually, the problem boils down to one thing: these businesses are marketing to the wrong people. They never hire growth teams or take the time to research how to find their social target audience online, specifically on social media. They try to follow everyone else and hope that some people will follow them back. This usually leaves them with an irrelevant audience that is not engaging or converting or no audience at all.
What everybody— small businesses, influencers, marketers— needs is a strategy for finding their perfect social audiences. Here, we outline a few non-negotiable steps you must take if you want to attract the right audience to your businesses on social media. These will work for you whether you already have an audience or you are new to social media.
1. Define your audience
You’re not going to make any meaningful headway on social media if you do not have a sense of the kind of people you want to target on there. Depending on your business’s positioning and it’s products/services, you can draw up a tight description of your ideal customer.
Some critical questions to ask yourself:
- Does your business cater more to any particular gender?
- Is there any age group or generation that your business appeals the most to?
- Does your business typically target people with money problems, low-income earners, mid-income earners, or people with plenty of spare cash to spend?
- Are there any values that your ideal customers tend to hold dear?
Let’s put this a little more in perspective. Digital marketing management companies like AdEspresso will most likely be targeting people who value premium-marketing tools or services and who are willing to spend up to $1000 annually for access to such services.
Writing service review businesses like Writing Judge and Pick The Writer would be on the lookout for all kinds of online and offline publishers who are looking for top-notch writing service recommendations.
Without this level of profiling, the content you create on social media will have little or no impact on your audience. If you already have working social media audiences but are looking to enter a different market, the parameters for the current group may not work for your new audience targeting.
2. Identify your target audiences’ social media channel of choice
Also, each social media channel has general attributes that define their general users. For example, according to a report by Pew Research, male users outnumber female users on LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitter.
Females outnumber males on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. The average number of social media accounts per user was at 3 in 2012. That number went up to 7 in 2016 and 8.5 in 2018.
The people who make up your target audience are going to be on a number of these social media platforms, but they are not going to be able to consistently be active on all of them, and frankly, neither can you nor should you want to.
Targeted social media marketing involves you identifying which social media channel that your ideal audience uses the most and optimize your social media strategy there. Of course, finding your target audience’s preferred social media channel is only possible after you’ve defined your audience attributes.
3. Ask your customers questions
This is another ideal strategy for people who already have a working social media audience and are not seeking an aggressive shift in audience type. You can create polls, short questionnaires, or full-on surveys and have your customers take them. The aim is to learn more about them besides what you can easily find out yourself.
The phrasing of these questions will differ for different audience types, but ultimately, the questions will be the same. With these survey tools, you want to find out their overall online behavior:
- Where do they love to hang out online?
- What is their favorite social media platform, and how often do they visit it?
- What kind of social accounts do they like to follow and engage with?
- Which kinds of sites do they like to visit?
- Which blogs/podcasts do they find more appealing to read/listen to?
- What kind of content do they mostly gravitate toward?
These will give you a much deeper insight into where you can find more people like them, the kind of content to serve them, the frequency of engagement, and more. You can create a poll on Facebook, or use simple tools like Google Forms, Type Forms, or Survey Monkey to create a questionnaire/survey.
As stated earlier, the way you structure these questions is up to you, but make sure you do them in a way that makes sense and doesn’t come off like an interrogation to your customers.
4. Determine your audience size
Most businesses and social media marketers are aware of this, especially when they want to run ads on social media to attract more of their target audience. To determine your audience size, Facebook Ads Manager is a prime choice. This is because, in Facebook’s Ad Manager, you can choose from a plethora of demographic data types to determine the people you want to market to.
Let’s say that you’re looking for people aged 18 to 25 who reside in New York, love to play games and have a wage cap of at least $5,000, Facebook will furnish you with the number of people that fit those targeting criteria. Of course, the parameters that you input in the Ads Manager should be gotten from the data you collected while determining your target audience.
As a general rule, when running Facebook Ads, ensure that your target audience is not too broad. Typically, for small businesses, an audience size of 250,000 is too large for a single ad, and a size of around 1,000 is too small. If your audience is in any of these extremes, you need to either niche down further or let up a bit on your targeting. The sweet spot is almost always between these audience limits but will vary with each business. If you don’t target right, you may end up blowing your ad budget with little or nothing to show for it.
Final Word
Do not make the mistake of spending time and energy, creating content to engage with your audience when you haven’t put in corresponding effort to define it accurately. Follow all the steps above correctly so that when it is time to cater to your social media audience, you won’t have a problem creating content that they like because you’ll be producing the right content for the optimal audience.