The best part about marketing is the creativity that it allows us to display. However, this creativity must be adjusted to the wants and needs of the target audience. Having data that shows the target audience will help improve marketing efforts directed towards the audience. This leads to higher conversions and more engagement.

Now, a good marketer will have a general idea of the target audience. However, hard data beats intuition every time. The following list will explain some other reasons why you should have a good understanding of your social media and Instagram target audience.

Four Reasons You Should Care About Your Target Audience

1. It is easier to have a uniform content strategy

Discovering your Instagram target audience allows you to explore new content strategies with them. In other words, this allows you to offer consistent and easily recognisable content to your audience.

This means that your audience will quickly recognise your photos while scrolling their Instagram feed which can go a long way in Improving your conversion rate and brand exposure.

2. Develop targeted creatives

This point relates to the previous one. More specifically, it allows your team to create very specific creatives that appeal to the people in your target audience. For example, a target audience of older men will have vastly different tastes than a target audience of younger women.

A more general approach just does not work as effectively. Trying to please too many people at the same time does not work in the marketing space. This is one of the reasons why segmentation and targeting are so important.

3. Potential Partnerships

If you share a target audience with other brands, then this opens up the possibility of a partnership. Ideally, these brands would not be a direct competitor, but rather a brand that simply has a shared demographic.

For example, a company that sells designer high heels may partner with a company that sells designer dresses. The target demographics and audience overlap nicely, and this creates the potential to increase the followers for all parties involved.

A further benefit of this is that it maximises value to the consumer. In the example listed above, a woman that purchases a new dress from a referred Instagram will be much more likely to purchase a new pair of high heels to match the new dress.

The possibilities for value-add can be immense and lead to some interesting partnerships that you might not expect.

The only way to truly discover these partnerships, however, is to understand your target audience. Without an understanding of your target audience, developing an effective partnership is difficult and inefficient.

4. Ad targeting becomes easier

Targeting advertisements become much easier with an understanding of your target audience. Instagram allows you to create a lookalike audience, which is just an audience that has similar interests and qualities about your current audience.

This allows you to expand outward to more potential customers. Further, you can examine which audience engages with your content the most. You can then add extra focus towards that audience and see greater returns on your content.

How to Find Your Instagram Target Audience

Now that we know the importance of identifying a target audience, the next step involves defining your target audience. First, most marketers have a tendency to assume a very narrow target audience. This is most often an incorrect assumption. Your target audience is probably larger than your untested assumption.

Next, the best way to identify your target audience is to browse your Instagram feed and examine your followers. Yes, this is meticulous and time-consuming. However, it offers the best way to personally identify the target audience.

This step usually involves viewing the profiles of users that comment on your post. Examine their Instagram feed and try to determine their needs and wants. One tip that makes this more efficient is to look at the influencers in your niche and determine their target audience.

An example of examining Instagram feeds typically involves identifying the top commenters on your photos. Then start going through their Instagram profile and identify their general interests. You would be surprised at the common interests that many of your most devoted followers display.

Finally, add these interests and characteristics into some of the rough target segments you have already made. This will give you more specifics to work with than something generic such as “40-50 years old and likes shoes.”

We want to know their likes, dislikes, the type of photos they share, and the type of photos that they like. Once we have this information, we can move onto the next step of reaching them.

Tips to reach your target audience

Now that we have determined the importance of identifying a target audience and some tips to help identify a target audience we can go over a few brief tips to reach the target audience.

• Browse the competition’s Instagram account. Look for common trends that appear in the posts they share and the commenters on their photos.
• Use Instagram stories. This helps you stay at the top of the feed and in the mind of your followers. It also allows for brand storytelling.
  
• Post content at an appropriate time. Use the standard industry practice for the age of your target audience. Also, experiment with posting at the best time. Just remember to track the results.
  

Final Thoughts

All in all, the above guide showed the importance of identifying an Instagram audience. Some of those reasons include an easier time developing creative content for your feed and the ability to have a uniform content strategy.

It also discussed identifying a target audience. This is, of course, a little harder and requires more of a human touch to get everything just right. The best way involves looking past your assumptions and meticulously examining the profiles of your followers and your competition. Often this strategy will work better than some of the automated solutions offered by Instagram.

Finally, we discussed some tips to help you reach your target audience more effectively involving the use of appropriate posting time and the use of Instagram stories.