A vital part of creating a fool-proof and successful Instagram marketing strategy is having an in-depth knowledge of your target audience on the platform. If you do not know what motivates and intrigues your followers, you may have a hard time producing content, engaging your audience. More so, if you do not know when they are active the most, you may not see the kind of engagement you expect.
Thus, it is vital to know how to use the proper marketing techniques to target your audience. Here, in this article, we will discuss some ways to employ Instagram marketing for targeting your customers.
Begin with a bigger marketing persona
When you have a business of your own, you already have a buyer persona. You can understand the buyer persona as the profile of an ideal customer to whom you’ll be marketing your products. This information must be reused when you define the ideal Instagram target audience – you do not have to redo all the research. All you should do is communicate with your marketing team to get an idea of what your target audience looks like. You can further study analytics to get a more in-depth detail of these based on the social data.
For this, you need to ask yourself four questions:
- What is my product?
- What does my audience need?
- What kind of audience that you wish to attract or for whom is the product designed?
- How are you going to attract your audience?
Seek newer ways to interact with the community
The next strategy we recommend is influencer marketing, a prevalent marketing strategy to reach out to your target audience. It is an excellent tip for anyone who lacks money or is unable to create paid campaigns. It involves understanding your community – followers, friends, and fans – and seeking ways to collaborate.
A few types of content that work well in these arrangements include:
Behind the scenes – ‘One kind of content that certainly helps your audience connect with you is BTS content. As part of this kind of content, you can take your followers behind the scene and show them the making of your marketing campaigns or the latest products. Further, encourage them to respond and participate, and build engagement in this manner,’ suggests Jessica, an online algebra 2 tutor.
Takeovers – Another hugely prevalent kind of content that brings in massive engagement is takeovers. You can allow an employee, partner, or even a customer to take control of your page and add their unique flavor to the account. If you find account handling challenging, you can conduct some interviews or conduct close-up videos with people in the network while you have the phone in your hand.
Contests – At times, it is not easy for you to create a lot of Instagram content. If that’s the challenge you face, why not start a contest? A contest can be an incredible way to encourage your followers to contribute on their own. More so, contests are very engaging by nature, and since you can fetch phenomenal engagement rates with them if planned right.
Tutorials – Of course, you want your followers to believe and trust in your brand’s expertise and skill. How about providing your skills to others by teaching them the same? The tutorials can have simple tips and tricks or an in-depth product demo, which can present to the followers how you can help them.
Such simple content types can be excellent means and ways to reach your target audience.
Follow hobby or interest hashtags
Look for interest or hobby hashtags, which are associated with your business. For instance, if you offer finance assignment help, you can search for hashtags related to education, such as student homework, remote learning, online learning, etc. Similarly, if you sell beauty products, you can follow tags, such as matt makeup, dewy makeup, fashion, grooming, etc.
These will help you know what people with these hashtags are interested in and how you can introduce your products to your audience.
Make the most of Instagram demographics
When you begin the marketing research, your Instagram audience’s demographical insights can be pretty useful. For this, check out the Insights section on the application, and select Audience. In there, you can check the three key fundamental statistics of the followers – location, age, and gender. It is quintessential when you have to run Instagram ads in the future.
With the right knowledge of your Instagram insight, you can get at the forefront of your target audience. This will present you with useful insight into the users who already follow you.
For instance, if your target audience is primarily middle-aged men, but your insights tell you that it is the millennial women who follow you the most, then there is something wrong with your content or the strategy adopted by you, and you need to rethink and replan the whole drill. On the other hand, if your demographic statistics and buyer persona are in sync, you are doing your job pretty well.
Share your love with your followers via @mentions
An incredible way to tap into the bustling Instagram community is by communicating with your target audience and peers directly on the posts. This can be done with @mentions. Try to identify all the prevalent accounts that your audience follows, and subtly @mention them so that it looks authentic and reliable. There is a good chance that the mentioned account will repost your post on their page. “This will expose you and your brand to their followers, which is indeed your target audience,” suggests Tanya, an educator who offers assignment help services.
Experiment with different forms of content
Lastly, you can share several different kinds of content on Instagram in multiple different formats, such as carousel posts, single-image posts, Instagram Reels, IGTV, and Stories. When you post different content formats, you can know the kind of content that brings in maximum engagement.
Studies suggest that from amidst all kinds of posts, the carousel posts have the maximum engagement. Amongst carousel posts, the posts with a mix of both videos and photos have a maximum engagement. However, the fact of the matter is what works for someone’s business may or may not work for you. So, never treat engagement analysis as law.
Final Thoughts
So, these are some interesting ways in which Instagram marketing helps you fetch more customers. But remember, before you can do that, you need to get more Instagram saves.
Have more such ways to add to the list? Let us know in the comment box below.