Identifying the right target audience for your business is a critical piece of getting results from your social media. As indicated above, social media is a type of publication. Most business owners have some idea who their target audience for their content is but could benefit from spending some more time thinking it through.

At First, Less is More

How can you narrow down your target-audience? One of the hardest concepts to understand is narrowing down your target audience. When you’re a small business trying to grow, it doesn’t “intuitively” make sense to cut anyone out of your target audience. After all, it’s hard enough to find customers as it is, without eliminating anyone.

Turns out that’s wrong. If you are all things to all people, then you’re nothing special to anyone.

How to Narrow it Down

Step One

Think about the ideal customer for your business. Start with discerning which customers or clients have been the most satisfied with your business and have been the most profitable to serve. Think about your Unique Selling Point and which customers find this point the most meaningful.

Step Two

Now that you have someone in mind, think about how to define this specific customer. Most of us know the following about our target: gender, age, location, income. We may know a few additional behaviors, attitudes, etc.

Step Three

At this point, think about what you uniquely know about them from experience. It may be: they always engage with posts about sports, or they primarily live in certain zip codes, or they love technology. It is important to capture these identifying characteristics in a purposeful way.

Step Four

Think about the language the target uses. For example, is it trendy and full of slang or is it highly intellectual and formal? Do they pepper their remarks with industry jargon or talk to you on your level? It’s important that your communications on social media sound like they do.

Apply even more specificity to this audience

There are certain jobs that are never finished. Getting to know your target audience of your business is one of them. Like improving at golf or doing your taxes, it is never completely done. Sure you can start with a list of attributes and keep growing it over time, but it will never be complete. That is because a target audience is made up of people, who have endless qualities to discover and change over time.

Be methodical in your effort to create a target audience

It is important to catalogue any identifying characteristics you find. Creating a Customer Persona Worksheet with a list of related descriptions can be a simple way to make your target much more tangible.

More than One Target Audience

What if you can identify more than one target audience? For purposes of getting results from social media, it is best to start with one ideal audience. Again, to decide which to focus on, think about which is your most profitable or satisfied target audience. You can always work on other targets once you are successfully reaching your ideal group.

Putting these attributes to work for you

What can you do will all these attributes you have identified?

Use #1

As we have pointed out, the characteristics will be very useful for writing copy or choosing photos for social media and blogs, even your website.

We always recommend getting inside your audience’s head. What would this person want to read about? What would they find valuable? What would they find interesting or entertaining? Referring to these details in posts will be how the target knows you truly understand them and let you start to build trust with them. Once you have this trust, this ideal customer is yours. However, you couldn’t have reached this point if you continued to think of your target audience as anyone and everyone.

Use #2

The characteristics will be useful when you boost posts or advertise your business on social media and other places. All major social platforms let you target by what typical demographics and attributes we identified in Step Two (above) and somewhat beyond. Facebook/Instagram let you go way beyond the attributes you identified in Step Three (above). See Tutorial “Placing Your First Ad” for more information.

Try creating a Customer Persona similar to the one above to capture all your information. Put the highlights of your information into your app 3-2-1 Marketing Plan. You may have one persona or several for your ideal target market.

To learn more about target audience, visit our private Facebook group, The Small Biz Builders. Have you found a good way to learn more about your target audience? Share it with the group.