Finding Your Audience

Pinpointing your business' target audience is beneficial to your business because it informs how you should proceed with your market strategy and molds your brand voice. Having your audience locked in will also assist with observing what your audience likes, and compare that to what you're doing to see if it works. A reported 1/3 of the world's population is on social media, so where do we begin to break this group down until we find your target audience?

We'll start by picking 3 to 5 businesses' social media accounts, small or large, who have a similar product. Write them down. View the customers who are engaging with that brand. View their commentary under the posts (there may be clues as to what you could do better) and make a list of characteristics that would describe the type of person they are. View the public profiles and get a sense of the type of person who uses that product. This is the number one task to perform to begin pinpointing your target audience. It will also give you a view of the market you're entering.

Now that we have a list of characteristics and have observed our potential audience, let's begin to envision our perfect audience member. What type of personality does our audience member have? What kind of hobbies do they have? This is a great starting place. Next, and this is more applicable to those who have a Business or Creator social media profile, we're going to view our profile insights. (Your business should absolutely have a social media profile.)

We have a separate article breaking down how to read your Instagram insights, so we won't go too in depth in this article, but your insights will lay out the gender, age range, and location of your most frequented supporters. View these insights and add the information to your envisioned audience member. Now our perfect audience member has a personality, language, hobbies, age, location and gender.

Our final step in finding our target audience, at least to start, is to search for consumer and online activity reports on people in the age, gender, and location demographics (nice to have) that our current perfect audience member falls into. Finally, our ideal customer now has an age, gender, location, personality, hobbies, buying patterns, and online activity. We're at a great starting point to start using this information to inform our decisions from market strategy to brand voice, and down to where our business will perform best.