Locating the Target Audiences

Are you having a problem on finding the audience? Are you struggling on how to connect with your customers on social networks? Do you even know where the audiences usually hang out online? In optimizing the social media marketing efforts, it is important to know who the target customer and which social networks they spend their time.

1. Identify the Ideal Customer

• Identify the business avatar, it means that you will create a fictional persona of the ideal customer in which it will come up to the point of naming it. The clearer the avatar is, the easier it to find people on social media who resemble the persona.

2. Determining the target audience size

• You can use Facebook Ads Manager to estimate the size of the target audience. This is good business information because if the audience is too small, it may need to change the offering to expand the audiences. On the flipside, if the audience is too large, it might want to target a narrower niche to start. And of course, not everyone is on Facebook but according to research 60% are on Facebook. Still, that number is a good starting point.

3. Surveying Customers

• If you already have been in the business for a length of time, you may have a customer that you can survey on. The purpose of this is to optimize the social media campaigns, spending the ad dollars and targeting guest blogging opportunities, and need to know where the audiences hang out online. You can use free tools like SurveyMonkey to collect answers.

4. Need to research the online behavior

• What if you’re just starting out? In these, simply supplement the surveys and you can research online behavior. It’s not difficult to find studies and info-graphics that can provide information on specific platforms or other countries.

5. Find and Connect with the Customers

• Once you get the results from the survey and have reviewed the demographics of the available research, it’s about time to put that knowledge to work across different social media and digital marketing platforms. It is also important to note that you can upload the email database to almost all social media platforms to find the customers there.

Connect with core group on any platform to jumpstart online networking there and providing social proof that will connect and someone worth knowing for. Here are two tips on how to connect with the ideal customers on the platforms that will work for many businesses and entrepreneurs:

1. Facebook

• In most social media marketers, it will tell you that the organic reach of businesses on Facebook has tanked. And, if you’re trying to find the audience on Facebook, the easiest way is to target the ideal demographic with the use of Facebook Ads Manager. Facebook Ads Manager will give the other option to find the audience. You can upload the customer’s email addresses to Facebook Ads Manager to create a custom audience. Once you’ve created the custom audience, it can then ask Facebook to create a lookalike audience. Facebook can put it in front of more people who like the current audience.

2. Twitter

• Twitter is smaller than Facebook but it offers other opportunities to find the ideal customers. Start with the ad platform at ads.twitter.com. This not the same granular targeting tools of Facebook, but it can still find and reach your audience based on geography, gender, keywords, interests, influencers and more.