Importance of Goals and Target Audiences
In order to have a successful business in today’s world, having a social media presence is very important. If you already have social media accounts, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and/or Youtube, that’s a great start.
However, having an account isn’t enough for success.
Many people make the mistake of creating a social media account for marketing purposes, but fail to implement a marketing strategy. They don’t consider importance of goals and target audiences.
In this post, I’ll share some tips on how to figure out your goals and find your target audience.
Unfortunately there are too many cases where people create a social media account, fill out all necessary information, post a few posts and then just give up and disappear after a few months.
This leaves the people that did follow you wondering where you went, and people might be waiting for answers that they aren’t getting from you. This could be perceived as unprofessional and can really damage your business’s reputation.
The Importance of Goals – What Are Your Goals?
There are a few things that every social media marketing strategy needs to encompass. The first and most important one understanding the importance of your goals and identifying your goal.
Everyone has a goal for getting on social media, even if you might not know it at first.
It is important to ask yourself questions to get a better grasp of why you are doing this. Is it just for likes and followers? Is it to have an alternative platform to share information about your business? Is it an extra way to get leads and sales? If you don’t know what your main goal is, you’re going to have difficulty achieving that goal.
It’s okay to have more than one goal.
Start exploring your reasons for being on social media and write those reason down so you can start to get clear on your goal.
Here are some examples of goals that different businesses have:
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation
- Brand reputation
- Sales
- Customer support & loyalty
Going beyond understanding the importance of goals is to also understand and know your target audience.
Know Your Target Audience
If you create a social media presence without having a clear target audience in mind, you are ultimately setting yourself up for failure. In order to find your target audience, choose a group of people that will be easily persuaded by your message or cause.
What group of people can you provide the most value to?
What types of people can gain the most from the services you offer?
It is impossible to please everyone, and your account definitely won’t be for everyone. If you try to please everyone, you will get mediocre results.
You should create content towards the people you know you can help, and you’ll get much better results (in terms of followers, leads, sales, engagement, etc).
Once you know who your target audience is, do some research about what social media channels they are using. Are they most active on Facebook? What about Instagram? Once you know where they are most active, you can know where to spend most of your time and effort posting content.
Another thing to consider with your target audience is their age and gender. Are they younger, or older? Men, or women? Taking these factors into consideration can really help you figure out what content to post, and you can cater your posts better.
Do a Bit of Research & Take Advantage of Insights
If you have already created a Facebook or Instagram account, make sure that you have a business profile. This business profile allows you to see insights. These insights are great because you can get a better idea of exactly who is following you.
The insights will show you an exact percentage of how many women and men follow you. You can also see the average ages of your followers, along with where they are from.
Sometimes businesses make the mistake of assuming that the majority of their followers are women. When they go to their insights, they see that over 25% of their followers are men. This information is extremely useful because it can help you cater your content to better suit your followers.
I hope this blog post opened your eyes to the importance of goals, and a clear target audience as well.
These two things alone can really boost your social media efforts and help your business out. By focusing on your goals and target audiences you can create better content for people who need it most.
