Targeting Your Perfect Audience on Social Media

Digital content is the heartbeat of most social media campaigns. But whether it’s images, videos, articles, or just updates… who that content lands in front of will largely determine its success. While some businesses and social media marketers make an aggressive attempt to fine-tune their messages and content until their media mix attracts the most amount of attention possible, there’s a much quicker and cheaper way to guarantee the success of content.

Finding the perfect audience. Finding the right audience and ensuring that all content is optimized and targeted can reduce creative drain, and save dozens of hours comparing and re-generating expensive, high-quality content. Of course, there are plenty of ways to target with paid advertising on social media websites like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter; but clever social media marketers know better than to rely strictly on paid options, which can quickly drain even a robust media budget. Instead, it’s possible to target using organic posts… and we’re going to help you learn how! Using these great targeting tricks can increase your social campaign’s engagement rates, and even likely provide a great experience for readers.

Do Your Research

Do you know what your target audience for your product or website even is? Do you know what they like? Even if you think you know, it’s important to confirm those feelings (or disprove them) with research. The best ways to do this is to speak to people directly: either interviewing or surveying existing customers, or using a market research platform to reach out to possible consumers. And this doesn’t need to be expensive! Plenty of resources can offer market research as cheap as $1 per individual response to your surveys. Always design detailed questions around the kinds of advertising your survey-takers often click or share on social media, and have them rate their interest in your product. You’ll quickly have all the information you need on gender, age, education, and media consumption demographics! And once you know your target demographic (the one with the most interest in your product), you can do more research on their buying habits online.

Connect With Existing Customers

Connect with any existing customers on your social media accounts to build a first audience, that way you have an immediate audience. But don’t stop there! Connect with other industry partners, and look for primary influencers in the demographic which is your target audience. You can use social media targeting tools and programs like Sysomos to help you identify key influencers. To get influencers to talk about your product in their circles, you can easily engage them by offering free samples, or offer marketing opportunities.

Encourage Brand Advocacy

Even as a small business, if you’re wanting to increase your organic reach and targeting, you probably already have a great source of reach: your employees! One of the best ways which you can help quickly garner a foothold with organic targeting is by creating an advocacy program for your employees which rewards them for social sharing on their personal timelines. Not only will this help your brand reach a new audience regularly, but building employee satisfaction can promote a positive brand image.

The Bottom Line

Not everyone online will be interested in any product. Demographic research, just as in traditional marketing, can help yield information on who is most likely to be interested. And creating social media marketing campaigns targeted specifically towards the people most likely to want to buy is a powerful way to increase your social media marketing ROI and increase your customer base! And it’s easier than you think: it starts with research, identifying possible customers and letting them do the heavy lifting for you! After that, connect with existing customers and influencers of your ideal audience, so that you have an even spread of connections to rely on to promote your message. And don’t forget to allow employees to help by encouraging brand advocacy!