Finding your target audience is one of those marketing phrases that is often easier said than done. That’s because your audience will change over the years. As your business evolves, so will your audience. Thankfully, Instagram includes multiple features that make finding and engaging with your community easier.
Know Who You Want to Reach
With millions of users on Instagram, it is impossible to reach everyone and unreasonable to consider all users to be your target audience. It is paramount to pinpoint your audience’s interests, likes, dislikes, jargon, where they hang out, and multiple other demographics and psychographics. This is called creating a buyer persona. During this process, you will spend a lot of time researching your audience so that you can effectively reach and connect with them. Use social listening practices like the explore page, your competitor’s content, conversations in the comment section, and polls/surveys to gain more insight about what your audience wants.
Network & Make Connections
As the old saying goes, “you’ve got to give a little, to get a little.” Are you engaging on Instagram as much as you post? Did you know the more active you are in the Instagram community, the more the algorithm will show your content? One way to do this is to search your competitor’s content and see what their followers are saying. Follow their followers, comment on their content, and create content you’ve seen their audience request. You can also leverage connections with influencers to get your content in front of new eyes.
Optimize Your Hashtags
In 2019, you’re probably already using hashtags, but how are you optimizing their use? In the beginning, it’s best to only test 8-10 hashtags at a time to get a better idea of what’s working and what isn’t As you add more, be sure to switch them out and avoid using the same hashtags consecutively. Using a variety of larger hashtags and smaller hashtags will help boost your chances of new users seeing your content.
Ex: #love has 1.6 billion posts while #loveandhappiness has 205k posts
Take Advantage of Instagram’s Capabilities
Instagram is constantly updating its capabilities and features. Why not use them to your advantage? The Instagram story poll feature allows you to actively engage your audience and receive first-hand feedback. The hashtag search tool allows you to search hashtags for how many posts have used that particular hashtag. It also provides related hashtags (great for the larger and smaller hashtag mix tip) and shows the top posts for that hashtag (great for finding your competitor’s content). The location search allows you to search out top posts in a certain area (great for locally-based businesses).
If you keep these practices in mind, you should gradually see more accuracy in your audience targeting and your community is sure to grow.
Social media has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing.
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