Executing effective SMM using Audience targeting

Your social media marketing game will be way better if you consider audience targeting, let’s learn more about audience targeting and good things that can come from targeting your audience.

• What is SMM?
• What is audience targeting?
• Benefits of audience targeting for SMM
• Tips for audience targeting
• Final thoughts

What is SMM?

SMM or Social media marketing is to advertise your business via social media sites like Facebook and Instagram. Social media marketing is one way for brands to connect directly with the customers. It is good for creating brand awareness and building connections with customers.

Almost every brand is on social media and does social media marketing because it is cheap and can reach more people. Social media marketing makes connecting and interacting with customers and potential customers quick and easy. 

Social media marketing can be done free or paid depending on their strategies and decisions. The brand can market their product for free on social media and gain organic leads or pay for paid ads to boost their brand awareness and sales.

What is audience targeting

Audience targeting is the method of putting the audience into segments using their interests or demographic information in order to come up with the ads or campaign that suit them the most. Audience targeting is also used to make your ads effectively reach potential customers as well.

Demographic data that you need to consider while targeting the audience includes ages, gender, incomes, education, economic status, marital status and more. 

Psychographic data like values, beliefs, and motivations should be put in consideration while targeting the audience as well. Those mentioned aspects can influence audience behavior. The data can be collect by doing survey or interview, or creating buyer persona.

Audience targeting should initially be based on your buyer persona or existing customer. However, if you are targeting new groups of customers, you will need to base it on a new persona or representative of potential customers.

Benefits of audience targeting for SMM

It helps you gain more views

Audience targeting will make sure your paid ads are seen by targeted audiences. Which will then direct them to your social media.

Attracting the right audience through ads will bring more social media engagement like likes and shares. 

Moreover, having more views and interactions with the audience will help you climb up the search engine ranks and get to the top.

It makes you work easier

Targeting your audience will cut down your marketing work loads a lot. It narrows down the audience that you need to reach and the content you need to create. 

Knowing the targeted audience, you do not need to please everybody anymore. You will never be overwhelmed by the amount of  posts that you need to create. You can now specify the content of your posts and advertisement to only serve the targeted audience. This will guarantee good results of social media marketing with less work compared to not doing audience targeting.

It brings potential buyers to you

Audience targeting brings lots of opportunities to your brand. But most importantly, it drives potential customers to your brand with a chance of more sales.

When you target your audience, your ads and posts will attract more potential buyers to you. The ads that are sent to targeted audiences will bring people that really are interested in your products or services to you. 

When you do not know the targeted audience and post paid ads all over the platform, most people who see your ads might not be interested in your product at all. Which leads to no sales. While It is more likely for visitors from audience targeted ads to buy your products and increase your sales.

It saves your budget

For new or small businesses, the budget is the most valuable thing. You would try anything to lower the cost of marketing as much as you can. Targeting your audience can help you with saving the money.

You will be able to spend less budget on paid social media ads since you do not need to pay for more ads to reach many types of audiences. Instead you can just pay for ads that will be shown only to potential customers.

Targeted the audience will cut down social media ads cost greatly. Audience targeting will narrow down the range of people that you need to reach. You can get the same effective results with less cost if you only focus on targeted audiences.

Tips for audience targeting

Post useful content to attract the target audience

After targeting your audience, use the finding to make sure you post useful content where your audience prefers. The content that you post on brand’s social media should be something that your audience can make use of. 

Useful content that could be posted includes posts about discounts, promotions, product launch, and product reviews. These contents are ones that are considered useful for both your business and your customers.

Also, this useful content should be posted where your audience mostly are. For example, if Instagram gets the highest social media engagement, you may want to post primarily on there. You want to post content that brings social media engagement to your brand on the platforms that reach more target audiences.

Create focus groups to engage your audience

This tip is to help you while targeting your audience’s interests. If surveys and research are not working well, you may want to try conducting focus groups.

Focus groups can be done to gain information about audience preferences and interests directly from them. Focus groups will ensure the effectiveness of your marketing plans.You can use focus groups to confirm that your audience targeting is done right, and your social media marketing plans will work well with your targeted audience. 

The focus group is a small group of people that represent your current customers and people with targeted demographic criterias such as age, gender, and economic status.

Always learn more about your audience

The third tip is to keep learning about your audience. First audience targeting will be done based on current customers or persona. Which will work well for a while only. When you gain more audience and customers, you should look at the audience demographic again and make adjustments if needed. Retargeting your audience will lead to effective social media marketing results over time.

Also, if you want to expand your brand or just launch new products or services, you will need to do audience targeting for that specific product as well. You should not use the same target audience for every product since it will not make the most effective social media marketing for your brand. Each product has its own purpose and will be suitable for different groups of people.

One thing that could come from learning about your audience is a new product idea. You can expand your product range by creating new products using information about your current audience. It is great because you already know what your customers want and they will surely buy your product. You can also use that information to improve your products and services as well.

Perform A/B test to ensure the results

Lastly, this tip is to make sure your audience targeting is done right and really work in enhancing your social media marketing. 

A/B testing is a way to test the effectiveness of your content before posting them. It will reduce the risks of having useless social media post ads. A/B testing can tell you which types of content or formats of advertisement will get more engagement for your target audience. 

Using A/B tests alongside audience targeting will ensure the result of your social media ads and make sure you reach your goals.

Final thoughts

Since no one is more important than the audience when we are working on social media marketing, it is crucial to target your audience and use that information to create content that will be able to serve their needs and interests. Audience targeting brings many advantages which is the reason why you need to do audience targeting for your social media audience. To ace the social media marketing goals, follow the selected tips to achieve your social media goals with audience targeting.