The Instagram Marketer’s Guide to Discovering and Connecting with Your Target Audience 

For your business to evolve a successful Instagram marketing strategy, you need to have an in-depth understanding of its target audience. Unless you know what motivates them, you will not be able to create the right content for engaging them and building brand awareness and loyalty. Since it can be difficult to identify and target your target audience, you need to know how to do it the right way. Some tips on defining your target audience and how to get across to them with your content:

Begin with Defining the Larger Personas

If you have been marketing for a long time, it is likely you would have already defined its customer personas, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The point of defining customer personas is to understand how a typical customer looks, thinks, and behaves. To begin the process, you should ask yourself what your product is designed to do, who is it created for, and what problems your audience is seeking to resolve.

Conduct Competitive Intelligence 

One of the most effective ways of understanding your target audience’s profile and characteristics is to scrutinize what your competitors are doing on Instagram. Finding out about the kind of content they are publishing and the level of interaction and engagement with their followers can help to give you a better idea of what your Instagram target audience will also look like. You can also identify if some market segments are underserved or not served at all that you can successfully target. You can use one of the many online tools for analyzing the Instagram accounts of your competitors for important parameters like demographics, locations of followers, and brand mentions, as well as the kind of content that elicits the best engagement in terms of likes, comments, and shares. You can supplement organic engagement by collaborating with a digital marketing agency like Blastup.com to get more followers and likes.

Leverage Demographic Data Already with You 

Using analytics tools on your own Instagram account can yield a wealth of information about your target audience. You need to visit the “Audience” option under ‘Insights” to view important statistics about your followers like their age, gender, and location. You can combine this information with the buyer personas and the competitor intelligence to get a clearer idea of the profile of your Instagram audience.

Undertake Social Listening to Better Understand Conversations

One of the most important steps that you can take to understand your target audience on Instagram better and implement effective targeting tactics is audience research. Social listening, which is the art of understanding what your audience is talking about is important because unless you know what they are interested in, you will find it difficult to engage them with your content. However, for it to be effective, you must define your goals, says a Search Engine Journal report. Luckily there are quite a few social media listening tools that will allow you to track conversations around any specific subject. By monitoring the conversations, you will be able to get a better understanding of what they are talking about, what is their opinion on the subject, and who is making the effort to drive the conversations. Some of the tools also have a feature that permits you to frame questions around issues that are likely to benefit you. It will allow you to identify conversations and spread awareness of your brand.

Use Instagram Polls to Know What Your Audience Thinks

Rather than using secondary or indirect ways of finding out what your target audience thinks about something, you can ask them directly using opinion polls either on a post or Instagram Stories. By doing so, you will be able to understand better what makes your audience tick, so that you can improve your content targeting. You can straightway ask them regarding their content preferences and the kind of content they expect from you. Otherwise, you can create opinion polls to get to know their interests, hobbies, likes and aversions, shopping behavior, and more. Remember, as important as identifying your target audience on Instagram is, it is also vital to know what to do with all the information you have gathered. Once you know who your target audience is and what they want, you can create content that will help you to engage them better.

How to Reach and Engage with Your Instagram Audience

Use the right hashtags: Conducting competitor analysis with the help of social media monitoring tools can help you discover the most trending hashtags in your industry that you can use to drive the visibility of your posts.

Use location tags: To cater to the needs of the increasing number of people looking for local resources to fulfill their needs, businesses can use the location tagging feature of Instagram. When users perform local searches, the location-tagged posts and Stories show up and act to raise your brand’s visibility and engagement.

Collaborate with influencers with the right brand fit: Influencers tend to have a lot of authority over a large number of followers due to their domain expertise or celebrity status. By partnering with influencers that have the right fit with your brand, you can significantly increase your brand reach and awareness. You can use hashtag searches or an influencer discovery platform to identify potential influencers and then work out the details of your collaboration. Often, working with micro or nano-influencers is better because of their significantly higher rate of engagement than the big guys in the business.

Participate in trending conversations in your industry: Using social listening tools, you can discover trending conversations in your industry. Not only can you get a better understanding of the opinions and concerns of your target audience but also you can join in these conversations to project your domain authority. You can also kick off new posts on your account that are likely to have more engagement.

Conclusion 

By understanding the profile of your target audience together with what they need and want and their concerns, you can post content that will engage better with them. Constructing your buyer persona, conducting market intelligence, leveraging existing demographic data, undertaking social listening, and using opinion polls can help you to understand your target audience better.