When you read this title, you probably thought ‘Oh, who else doesn’t know how to find a target audience on Instagram?!’ Well, practically speaking, many aspiring and even already experienced entrepreneurs don’t; otherwise, they wouldn’t buy fake followers, take part in questionable giveaways and be members in engagement pods.
So in this article, we’ll talk about how to find a target audience for your Instagram account.
Interesting is that the number of followers doesn’t actually influence how active your followers are nor the quality of your audience. If you have a few followers, but they’re responding to your content, your account performance is much higher. So if you thoughtlessly buy Instagram followers, you should stop ASAP; you’d better find out who your real followers are.
Here’s how to do it in 5 simple steps.
Step 1. Define Your Target Audience
Before creating your Instagram account, you need to clearly understand who your buyer personas are. Are they men or women? How old are they? How do they make decisions on purchasing things? What are their fears and motivations? Where are they from? You need to know the answers to these questions to build a proper marketing strategy. The more target groups you segment, the more effective your Instagram marketing strategy will be.
When you know these people and clearly understand who they are, you will easily find them among millions of people on Instagram, create the content they will engage with and will promote your products without pushing it.
But here’s a but: the process of defining your target audience is endless. That’s not the job you can one day say about: I’ve finished! If your brand grows and develops, you will always find new target groups.
Step 2. Find Your Target Audience On Instagram
To understand your target audience better, you can visit their profile pages on social media, read outlets and social media groups they’re likely to be in, read forums, check influencers they’re following, subreddits or questions they ask on Quora.
It’s not a bad thing to do surveys and questionnaires to learn more about your potential customers. Don’t be shy and add all the questions you find important in the survey. Share the survey on social media and ask your followers to answer them.
Here’s how you can find your target buyer personas on the platform:
Competitors Analysis
Research your competitors on Instagram and check who’s following them. That’s a bit hard to do manually, so here’s the service that proves to be really helpful - Combin Growth.
To discover your competitors’ audience, download and install the app on your PC or Mac. Combin Growth is available for Windows, macOS and Linux.
Then open the app, open the Search tab. Switch from Posts to the Users search tab. Move to the Search by section to specify the type of audience you want to target. Click the field to open the drop-down list of options. Select either Followers, Followings, Commenters, Likers or Bio.
After selecting the audience type, enter your Instagram competitor’s username or even a URL to their post.
Specify the number of search results in the Search limit field.
Below the default search settings, there are Fast search and Advanced Filters and Analysis features.
• Enable the Fast search mode to load search results quicker but without information about accounts (e.g. following and followers count, gender, etc.)
• Enable the Advanced Filters, and Analysis feature to activate machine learning user analysis and set the preferable language, gender, last activity, following/followers range filters.
Click Find after setting search parameters. Plain and simple!
Tip: If you want your results to be more specific, you can filter them by the number of likes, comments and followers, date posted, virality, followers/following ratio and engagement rate.
Hashtags And Locations
Research hashtags that are relevant to your business. Find posts by these hashtags; thus, you’ll find followers who are potentially interested in your products. The same works for locations: if you’re interested in an audience located in a specific area, you can find them by typing these locations on Instagram.
Or you can do that a lot easier with Combin Growth. Open the Search tab again and choose the Hashtags and Locations search-by parameter. Add one or several hashtags relevant to your project and add a location. Apply advanced search parameters if you like, and press Find. Here you go!
Relevant Influencers’ Followers
If you have assumptions which influencers your target audience might follow, you can also research their followers. Or you can focus on the influencers who have blogs in your niche, for example, travel bloggers, cooking influencers, fitness bloggers and so on.
In Combin Growth, it works the same as with competitors: open the Users tab and search by followers, likers, or commenters of a particular influencer.
TIP: if you want to find and engage with the most active audience, choose likers and commenters since these users are the most responsive.
Step 3. Attract Your Potential Audience’s Attention
To get discovered by the target audience, you need to engage with them and draw their attention. You can do that also with Combin Growth.
In two previous points, we have found potentially relevant customers within the app. Now let’s get back to the search results and try to engage with them.
Combin Growth allows for liking, commenting, and following the posts you’ve found and following the accounts you’ve found when searching by Users.
You can select one, several or all search results and start interacting with it: like, comment or follow. The actions will be taken in accordance with the Instagram daily or hourly limits which are individual for every account. As soon as you’ve reached your limit, Combin stops all the activity not to put your account at risk.
Also, you’re able to create different comments in order not to look spammy.
To track the progress of your actions, open the Tab tasks.
Other Tips For Driving Your Audience’s Attention
• Post at hours when your followers are active. You can learn this data in your Instagram Insights. Don’t forget to switch your account to Business or Creator before you do.
• In the Insights, you can also track which posts worked better than others and post such content more frequently.
• Use stories to interact with your followers daily.
• Follow hashtags relevant to your business or used by your competitors. Thus you will clearly see who your buyer personas are.
• Leverage paid social. Target ads will help you reach the right audience.
• Encourage your audience to share user-generated content mentioning your account. Offer them a discount or bonuses if they leave a review about your company and share it on Instagram tagging your page.
• Host flash mobs with your branded hashtag. Come up with a challenge idea and ask all the participants to use the branded hashtag you’ve created specifically for this challenge.
• Do giveaways with useful and niche-specific prizes. Laptops and iPhones are great, but with such prizes, you will attract people who want to get them for free but not interested in your brand. Such giveaways will kill your page. So make sure that the prize is related to your niche and is useful to your audience.
Step 4. Analyse And Tailor Your Content
As your business grows, your clientele and followership will do too. Your audience might become more diverse and have diverse interests, as well. So you need to be ready to change the content strategy every so often and tailor your content to the followers’ expectations.
You can ask your followers yourself what posts, videos, stories or IGTV they would like to see.
Researching your competitors’ content ideas and adjusting them to your goals is also a not bad strategy.
Step 5. Create A Content Calendar
Now that you've thoroughly researched your target audience, it's time to start creating your content calendar. Be sure to note which customer group each post is targeting on. Over time, your plan will change: feel free to cross out inefficient formats and test new ideas.
Tools like Combin Scheduler will assist you with this: you can plan Instagram posts and stories for automated publication instantly or for hours, days, and weeks.
