How to Use Instagram to Reach Your Target Audience

0
1135

Share on LinkedIn

Do you want to learn how to reach your target audience on Instagram? Social media is an excellent tool for generating leads, nurturing customers, and engaging with your followers. Instagram is one of the most popular platforms for users today, with over 1 billion active users.

New marketers and business owners tend to lose the thread, so to speak, when working with several social media platforms at the same time. There are plenty of features on all of these different sites, and one feature might appear worthless on one platform, but work as the foundation for other social sites. Think back to hashtags on Twitter before they were widely implemented on Facebook.

Today we are going to clear up some of the mystery and show you how to use Instagram to reach your target audience and grow your business.

Let’s dive in!

Define Your Audience

The first thing you’ll want to do is define your target audience on Instagram. It’s impossible to reach a group of people if you don’t know what to look for, right?

There are several ways you can define your customers on Instagram. We suggest reviewing your Instagram and website analytics to find common threads between your followers and their buying decisions on your website.

You’ll want to explore their behavior on your website, and their habits on Instagram. The more time you spend analyzing your customer demographics, the better chance you’ll have at posting relatable content that generates clicks and conversions.

Customer personas are essentially fact sheets that you make about your various customer segments. After gathering enough information, create broad customer personas that define the people most likely to visit your website. For instance, an online pet shop would segment their Instagram followers based on whether they own cats or dogs for more personalized content and promotions.

Practice Social Listening and Engage

Social listening is a broad term used to describe observing what customers, partners, and followers are saying about your brand. Not only can you use this information to learn more about your target audience, but you can use social listening to create unique engagement opportunities.

Customers want to do business with brands that actively engage with people on social media. If you’re monitoring your social mentions, you’re going to see people talking about your brand, relevant keywords, and your products.

Why is all of this information helpful?

Well, 55% of buyers do research on social media. Imagine if someone posed a question to a group where they asked about your product or service, and you were able to swoop in and help. Sharing helpful testimonials, encouraging customers to contact your support team, and building rapport are all critical for creating unique and compelling experiences for your followers.

Create a Viral Contest

Online giveaways give you plenty of opportunities to grow your Instagram channel and business as a whole. There are quite a few decisions you’ll have to make before you run your first contest.

The first thing you’ll have to decide on is the prize you want to give away. If your goal is to attract a broad audience of new followers, you might want to consider offering a prize that everyone can enjoy, like an Amazon gift card.

If you’re looking to attract your current subscriber base, you may want to offer one of your products or subscription services to the winner of the event.

After you decide on the prize, you’re going to need to think about the rules of your giveaway. Do you want subscribers to share your post for a chance to enter? Can consumers tag three friends instead? Deciding on how you want people to participate with your contest will help you frame the rest of the event around your goals and expectations.

Instagram is a great place for creating viral posts, and contests are, without a doubt, one of the quickest ways to reach your target audience.

Write and Share Relevant Content

Finally, let’s talk about the content you’re sharing on Instagram. Instagram is designed for sharing photos and tagging friends and essential hashtags. It’s not easy to share your written content on this platform, but you can repurpose your existing content to work with Instagram.

You could take one of your most popular blog posts and turn it into an infographic. Share your shiny new infographic on Instagram with all of the relevant hashtags, and you’re more likely to see more engagement and traffic on your website. Studies show that a staggering 31.24% of organic website traffic comes from social media, so creating and sharing content is a must.

It’s also possible to share your blog posts on the platform, but you have to create an attractive image or video if you want to get users to click the link and check out your article. If you’ve done your homework, you’ll know what kind of content your users want to see and can use that information to create different types of media that will encourage business growth.

Let’s say you have an email marketing firm and want to reach potential clients on Instagram. You could create and share a comprehensive guide from your blog with an attractive infographic that gives users the gist of your message. Since most of your followers are interested in email marketing, they are more likely to click through and read the complete article.

Back to You

Instagram earned an unbelievable $4 billion in ad revenue last year, and that trend doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Users love the fact that they can log on to their Instagram and get news from brands and their friends in seconds.

If you want to continue reaching your target audience on this social media platform, research is vital to your success. You need to understand the people clicking on your profile so you can deliver content and engagement that they expect.

The more time you spend working with Instagram and your followers, the better chance you have at building a website that encourages interaction and engagement from your target audience.

Syed Balkhi
Syed Balkhi is the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site. With over 10 years of experience, he’s the leading WordPress expert in the industry. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social media networks.

ADD YOUR COMMENT

Please use comments to add value to the discussion. Maximum one link to an educational blog post or article. We will NOT PUBLISH brief comments like "good post," comments that mainly promote links, or comments with links to companies, products, or services.

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here