Defining your target audience is one of the things that many people skip right over. It’s tempting to go straight to creating content, which is one of the most exciting parts of social media. But if you don’t know who you are creating that content for, your message won’t be very impactful.
The first rule of marketing is that you have to segment the market. If you are trying to speak to everyone, your message is resonating with no one. That’s why every successful marketing campaign begins with clearly defining a target audience.
The more you can hone in on your target audience – who they are, where they live, what they’re interested in – the more targeted and meaningful you can make your messaging. Identifying your target audience helps you to know:
- What social media channels to be on
- What to post about and what topics to be covering
- What words or language to use to grab your audience’s attention
- How to effectively target your audiences with ads or boosted posts
It’s crazy how you can reap all of these benefits just by defining your target audience – and it’s a lot easier than you think! Here is my simple process to identifying your target audience.
1. Define your audiences
There are two audience categories you should pay attention to: 1) your current clients and 2) those you hope to reach, or your dream clients. Grab a pen and some paper and let’s list them out!
Start with your current audience. Who are your clients? Break them down into customer segments. For example, your audiences may be home buyers, real estate investors, and commercial property owners.
Next, write down new or potential clients that you want to attract. Who do you want to work with? Who are you hoping to reach? Maybe you want to work with buyers in a specific zip code or a certain stage of life. Write them down!
2. Develop your audience
Now that you have these audiences listed out, write down as much as you can about each one. What are their interests and passions? What are their demographics and what neighborhood do they live in? What are their pain points? What are they looking for in their purchase? What are they motivated by?
Bonus tip: try to use the words they use to describe their problems, not your own words. You may know they need more square footage and an extra half bath, but in their eyes, they just need more space for their growing family. Speaking like them will help you to better understand the way they think – and help you to reach them with your marketing.
3. Research
The next step in the process is to write down all of the things that you don’t know about your audiences.
It’s okay if you don’t know everything about your audiences right now – but you don’t have to stay in the dark. The more you understand your audience, the better you can connect with them.
Do some market research. “Research” may sound scary, but I promise that it doesn’t have to be! It’s as easy as getting together with a friend that falls into that category and asking them some questions. You can also call or email a current or potential client with a list of questions – people are usually very willing to help, especially if you make it easy on them. You can even join a Facebook group with people that fall into your target audience and see if you can do a quick, informal interview. And of course, you can always do Google searches. Spend time on websites that your target customers frequent often and look at what your competitors are saying to this audience type. This market research might lead to some new and great ideas.
4. Align with your audience
You should now have a pretty clear idea of not only who your target audience is, but also what they are like. The last step is to see how you can best connect with them. List out the ways that you can help them – how are you specifically poised to help alleviate their problems? In what areas can you provide helpful and relevant education? These are the topics that you should be covering – and what you should be talking about.
Your social media content should build your reputation and develop a relationship with your target audience. The main goal is to earn their trust and respect, and every post should give your social media audience something of value. Defining your target audience will tell you where and how you should be sharing your story.
Taking just a little bit of time to identify your target audience makes the rest of your content strategy so much easier and more effective. And once you know who you are speaking to, you can go ahead and get to the good stuff – creating that content!