Choosing Target Audience on Instagram: Key Questions

Starting a business is one thing; finding a target audience for that business is another. That’s why we had to add some important points to our article Want to Market on Instagram? Find the Right Audience.

Today, finding a target audience for your business can be a bit challenging, but with the ideal strategies, practically any Instagram business owner will achieve this in no time.

Market research on your target audience is an effective way to identify the types of people that are likely to be interested in your products or services. Some brand owners on Instagram have the illusion that their brand is for everyone, or it would work the same way for everyone.

Best believe they couldn’t be so wrong. No brand is made for everyone. Every product/service is for a particular set of people. Finding those set of people can be extremely tricky, especially on Instagram.

Sometimes brands would be surprised to find out that they fall way below the target mark set when launching a campaign or branching out because they fail to consider key factors while planning their target audience. You don't want to end up receiving less traffic than you had expected. 

Here are a few of those factors Instagram brands, businesses, influencers, and creators should consider before choosing a target audience.
 

How well do you know your current audience?

Before you go for a new target audience to market your brand, you need to ask yourself how well you know the niche you’re in and the audience you currently have.

This can be very important to your brand because mapping out key attributes associated with users and their common interests would help you zero in on essential features or a persona that your products and services would surely appeal to.

Gender is one of the many factors you should consider. Don’t stop there; discover the specifics that make up the majority of your audience. Knowing the majority gender, for one, will help you identify why they’re either engaging with your content or why the minority isn’t. The ethnicity and religion of your current audience also come in handy.

Most times we gain an audience totally outside of our initial target audience. This is due to the development of secondary uses or functions that products or services were originally designed for.

A review of the current audience and niche provides you with ample information to pick a target audience. It also gives you information on markets you may not have considered when forming your expansion plans.
 

What are the demographics?

Instagram brands should always be ready to examine the most important demographic factors that can help them choose their target audience. Some of these may include age, marital status, gender, education level, income level, religion, and occupation.

Let your market research lead to the demographics that fit your brand and sales. By knowing who would use your products or benefit from it, you get a better idea of how to make your service a turning point for most of the people using your brand.

Does your Instagram target audience consist of tennis players or fashion designers? What about high school kids? Or married people in their late 50's? These are questions you need to ask yourself when starting your Instagram page.
 

What are the geographical regions?

If you’re marketing a physical product, geographical region is a factor you must consider.

Understand where your customers are likely to come from. While highlighting attributes that are associated with such regions that would make your brand appealing to customers from the specified region. By doing this, you can easily create local content for a specific target audience.

Brands that ship products can take advantage of this by reaching users located in market-friendly locations. It is always advisable to start by marketing to those in your geographical region then grow as time goes on.
 

What’s the competition?

The competition goes a long way in determining and structuring your choice of an audience.
 

• Identify Competition

Identify the competitors you’re likely to face when trying to launch your brand, especially in new markets. Consider both strengths and weaknesses exhibited by a competing brand in such a market and the level of success they have achieved. You would do yourself no favors trying to gain audiences that are already engaged by a competitor without the knowledge of the strength your products or services have over theirs.
 

• Saturated Market

It’s best to avoid markets saturated with competitors that sell directly similar products. Go ahead and take advantage of a new market where competition might exist but products that on offer are not direct substitutes for yours.
 

• Future Competition

The future competitors are also vital here. Going into a new market might be lucrative at the initial stage. However, there’s the risk of engagements reducing as soon as competing brands decide to join in on the success train. Choose a target audience that would enable you to curtail or have some form of control over such a possibility. Think of monopolies, or at least oligopolies.
 

• Dissatisfied Customers

This is where you hunt for the majority amongst the dissatisfied customers of a competing brand. Keeping tabs on the competition around you, making an analysis of the audiences dissatisfied with your competitors' offerings, and highlighting their reasons for the loss of appeal. This set of audiences could be added to your target list, as it would be of great advantage if your product meets the requirements of this audience as they would easily be persuaded to try your brand.
 

Product & Service Analysis

Name the features of every one of your products or services, understand ways they would work for customers, and most especially, understand the benefits your customers can get from it.

Analyzing your products and services is a very important step towards producing your customers with the necessary benefits they are hoping for. Put yourself in their shoes and look at your products/services from their POV. In essence, know their pain points.

This way, you can have a perfect image of exactly who and where your products should fit. You get a clear difference of who will benefit highly from your brand, and those who are less likely to.

When carrying out target marking, do not focus on a particular set of people and then rule out the others. Target marketing involves you focusing on a specific audience, not excluding others who are less likely to favor your Instagram business.
 

Final thoughts

Choosing your brand's Instagram target audience requires a great level of planning. Say your brand's target audience lives in a different time zone that's pretty far away from yours.

You might as well consider what time of the day to post contents on Instagram, to increase your user engagement level. These are just some of the few considerations you need to have in mind when you go into Instagram marketing.