A Quick Guide to Target Audience on Instagram

A successful Instagram marketing strategy starts with an in-depth understanding of your target audience.

You won’t be able to produce engaging content unless you know what engages and motivates your followers. You won’t have much success reaching them unless you know when they are active.

In order to reach your target audience, you need to find out how to find them on Instagram and discover how to target them effectively. This post will teach you how to do that.

How to find and research your Instagram audience

We’ll begin with a few key methods for defining your Instagram target audience. Additionally, you’ll learn how to target an audience on Instagram by learning some audience research tips.

1. Start with a larger persona

It’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. It often makes sense to use the same buyer personas to define your Instagram target audience if your business has already defined buyer personas.

To reach your target audience, you have to know who they are. And to know who they are, you have to think about their age, their location, their relationship status, their agenda, their personality, their interest, their education, and their career. You need to ask yourself what your audience wants and how you will give it to them. You need to ask yourself what they need and if you can provide that thing.

Taking notes and organizing information is easier with a product like Evernote, for instance.

Their typical target market would be: a) busy professionals b) looking for solutions to organize their information and tasks c) and increase their productivity.

2. Collect competitive insight

Taking a look at your competitors’ Instagram followers can give you a lot of information about your target audience. Find out how many followers they have and what types of posts they’re publishing. This can help you determine who your Instagram target audience should be. Once you’ve compiled your own picture of your audience, you can find out if there are any gaps or missing segments.

Besides being a great tool for analyzing your competitors, Phlanx’s Influencer Auditor is also meant to research influencers. It will generate an audit report of their social media account just by entering their social media handle.

The location of followers, demographics, and brand mentions of an audience can be uncovered.

3. Make use of existing demographic data

From your Instagram analytics, you can get a lot of demographic information about your target audience.

Click on “Audience” under “Insights”. Your following statistics are shown here, including the age range, gender, and location of your followers.

You can combine this data with the information you collected from competitor research and your buyer personas. You should be able to see what your Instagram target audience looks like after reading this.

4. Listen to relevant conversations on social media

Understanding your audience and targeting your Instagram posts effectively begins with audience research.

Using social listening is one of the best ways to understand your Instagram target audience. You’ll have a hard time understanding how to engage your audience unless you understand what they are interested in and what they are talking about.

5. Use Instagram polls to your advantage

Why not ask your audience directly if you’re researching them?

By using Instagram Stories polls, you can better understand your audience and improve your Instagram targeting.

If you want to know what type of content they prefer and what they expect from you, you can ask them. Alternatively, you can create polls to narrow down on their likes and dislikes, their interests and hobbies, their shopping habits, etc.

Engaging and reaching your Instagram target audience

If you don’t know what to do with the data, finding your Instagram target audience isn’t enough.

You can use the insights you gather to target Instagram more effectively once you know who your target audience is and what they want. To reach and engage your audience on Instagram, follow these tips:

1. Use the right hashtags

You can get in front of the right audience by using the right hashtags.

It is important that your target audience has interests related to your brand and/or industry. Using or following industry-specific hashtags is also something they will do.

You must make sure that your hashtags are used in a way that allows the right people to discover your content.

2. Use location tagging

Make use of Instagram’s location tagging feature for location-based targeting. As location-tagged posts and Stories appear in relevant searches, this feature can significantly boost the visibility of your posts.

People searching for content or events captured at those locations will be able to find your posts. Content that’s relevant to them has a good chance of attracting their attention and engaging them.

3. Engage the right influencers

As a result of their passion and expertise, influencers are experts in particular niches. There are hundreds of thousands of followers whose interests align with theirs.

By working with the right influencers, you can effectively reach your Instagram target audience. This would involve partnering with influencers who are followed and admired by your target audience.

There are several ways to find Instagram influencers relevant to your brand.

  • Using hashtags – Conduct a hashtag search using industry-specific or brand-specific hashtags. You can find influencer content in your search results by looking at the “Top Posts”. If you are a home décor brand, for example, you want to reach people interested in DIY home décor. Using this tool, you can narrow down influencers who develop highly relevant content in your niche. You can find the top posts using the hashtag #diyhomedecor in the search results.
  • Using influencer discovery platforms – Searching for influencers can also be done on influencer discovery platforms such as BuzzSumo or Influence.co. Simply type in a keyword related to your industry, and the platforms will show you the most relevant influencers.

Depending on your objectives, you can approach influencers with several types of partnerships. These could include:

  • Ask them to review your product or service
  • Encourage them to share your content with their followers
  • Create a giveaway contest in partnership with them
  • For a specified period of time, let them manage your social media accounts
  • Put your brand or product in an ingenious position

Yes Style, a K-beauty retailer, teamed up with beauty influencer @sophsmakeupp to promote their products. Like the content she regularly produces, the influencer produced a short tutorial video. She used products that can be purchased from Yes Style in the video and included a description of each.

4. Engage in relevant and trending conversations

You can get noticed by the right people by participating in the right conversations.

Try to identify and participate in some of the most active conversations, or you can start new discussions that are likely to spark engagement.

As well as tracking brand sentiment, these tools can be used to determine how people feel about your brand and your competitors. You will gain insights on how to differentiate your business and engage your target audience more effectively.

5. Analyze data to get inspiration

To learn more about your audience’s preferences, you can collect performance insights from your published content.

Analyze the types of content that generate the most engagement so you can determine what resonates with your audience. Use this information to strengthen your Instagram marketing strategy and create more engaging content.

Final Words

If you understand who your target audience is and what they like, you will be able to improve your Instagram engagement strategy.

Learn more about how to use Instagram Insights.

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