How To Engage With Your Target Audience

Beth Romelus

Many businesses attempt to create interesting marketing strategies to build their audience only to have very little return on investment. There are many brands that have several thousand followers on social media but have little engagement when it comes to liking and sharing their content on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. They failed on building an engaging community around their social media posts that converts their followers into customers.

So how can businesses build an audience and create a community that will become their advocates? By identifying your target audience and monitoring engagement. A brand can’t reap the benefits of a strong social following if they don’t take time to understand their interests and online behavior.

Identify Your Target Audience

You can’t build your audience if you don’t know who they are. A target audience is the specific group of people that your business wants to appeal or market to. Content creators must find the appropriate content that relates to them. For example, if your brand produces arts and crafts materials, marketing to sneaker lovers won’t make much sense. Here are things to consider when identifying your target audience:

Demographics

• Gender
  
• Age
  
• Job
  
• Location

Psychological Traits

• Personality
  
• Values
  
• Attitudes
  
• Interests
  
• Lifestyles

Narrowing down the group of people who will most likely enjoy your content will make marketing of your brand messages must easier.

Find the Best Channels

Social media has allowed people all around the world to communicate and interact with each other like never before. But not all social media channels are built the same.

So you need to pick the best channels that works best with promoting your business:

• Facebook: This is a friend-oriented network that allows businesses to create their own page. They can post pictures, videos, and online contests to engage with the people that like their page. They also offer advertising resources to reach target audiences with a call of action.
  
• Twitter: This is a microblogging network that allows users to tweet 140 character long messages and allows them to have human conversations with their followers. Users can insert images and videos in their tweets. Hashtags are inserted into messages for related topics and for them to be found easier in Twitter’s search engines. They also have advertising resources that allows tweets to be promoted and lead generation cards that allows businesses to gain important contact information.
  
• LinkedIn: This is a professional business and career network that allow businesses to create their own page and promote their online content like blog posts and infographics. They have advertising tools to promote people, groups, and companies. They even have the option of sending sponsored private messages to lead prospects.
  
• Pinterest: This is a visual board network. It allows users to create and curate content into pin boards. The visual dashboard is seen to users as an inspiration board. Business can promote their pins and benefit from their post’s long shelf-life.
  
• Instagram: This is a mobile picture network where businesses need to be very visually appealing. It allows brands to create their own story with pictures, hashtags, and @ tags with influential people.

How to Hack Engagement Growth

Now that you know how to figure out your target audience and understand the various social media channels, your business can increase social engagement with this very simple 3-step strategy:

1. Listen: Content creators and business owners must take time to listen and examine the actions of their target audience by tracking their online comments, reviews, social media activity, and email subscriptions. You want to know as much about their online activity as possible to successfully create targeted content and ad campaigns.
   
2. Test: Try different types of content and track your responses. Experiment with different formats like videos, pictures, blog posts, and polls to see what gets your audience’s attention the most.
   
3. Measure: Check your social media and content analytics to see what is giving you the best results. Track your likes, shares, retweets, and conversion rates. You metrics is crucial to success because you can determine what’s working and what is not.

Identifying your target audience and monitoring online engagement will increase the chance of converting social media followers into paying customers and soon brand advocates! Remember to listen, test, and measure your content’s performance repeatedly to create a powerful content curate system that will grow your business every day.

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