Team AdfluenceThe world of influencers thrives on how well they know their audiences. And once you have a hold on the pulse on your target audience, the task of connecting with them becomes exponentially easier. Now, it may demand a little extra effort, but the results go a long way. For starters, it helps you personalize communication, drive engagement, and nail down your marketing strategy. Understanding your target audience also influences various aspects of your marketing strategy, such as the type of content you create, the social media channels where you distribute it, the tone of your marketing strategy, and more.
Understanding your audience empowers you with quality and real-time data. For instance, Facebook collects data from at least a billion users around the world. And thanks to Facebook insights, influencers can analyze their target audience via interactions on the platform, demographical data, activity on other social media platforms, and more. Analyzing this 360-degree view of your target audience is critical. It provides you with crucial data that will allow you to make informed decisions.
Here’s how you can understand what makes your audience tick.
Direct Feedback
Feedback is the best way to improve your marketing strategy, and it just might be the easiest way to peek into your audience’s mind. Moreover, the data collected via customer feedback can help you identify commonalities and trends across your audience. Once you’ve identified the two, you can frame your content strategy to maximize its reach.
There are various ways to gather feedback. Here are a few of them:
Engagement Channels: One of the best ways for an influencer to gather feedback from their audience is to look at the engagement channels. Almost all live comment sections, if looked at carefully, will give you valuable feedback, all the negativity kept aside. It will help you understand what works for the audience and what does not. You need to cash in on anything that gets your comment section lit and avoid anything that gets your audience riled up.
A slightly more personal option than the comment section, you can engage with your audience via the live feature of Instagram too. Insta Live gets you in touch with the audience real-time and offers an almost two-way communication.
Instagram Polls: Instagram servers see an almost impossible usage from over 500 million active users per day. And if, due to any earthly reason, you’re willing to let that kind of impression slide away, it’d be a terrible miscalculation. Put that Instagram Poll sticker on your story and ask all the users the question that’s been bugging you.
The kind of feedback you receive from a story helps you model your content better. For example, if you put up a poll casually asking the audience whether they would like to see you in a new haircut or not, you’ll receive a wide amount of answers upon which you can chart the course of your actions. Poll sticker is an easy and fun way to collect the audience’s feedback, especially if you’ve got a large following.
Apart from polls, you can try asking questions, getting build-ups through countdowns or an emoji slider, understanding the emotion people associate with your content.
Social Media Listening
Understanding your audience does not just come from direct feedback. As an Instagram influencer, you need to be aware of what your audience is talking about on social media, just as they are aware about your engagements. And one of the best ways to do this is through Social media listening. It searches the web and the social space to analyze what’s being said about you and any topics of interest or relevance. It helps you analyze your audience’s interest and study their reaction, while keeping track of your post’s performance.
Here are a few ways in which you can put social media listening to use. Take a look –
Monitor keywords: Social media listening is heavily dependent on keywords. So, picking the right keywords is essential. The smart way to go about it is to cast a narrow net by picking keywords that are relevant to you and your niche. For example, some prominent keywords in the beauty sector include ‘makeup’, ‘beauty’, ‘beauty parlor’, ‘face’, ‘hair’, ‘nails’ etc. You can even use boolean alerts to narrow down your search because it allows you to pinpoint phrases and put limits on your keywords.
Track social media mentions: Now, you can hop from one platform to another in search of social media mentions, but that’s tiring and you’re likely to miss out on something or the other. Instead, use a social listening tool that picks up every mention of you and pulls it all into one place. That way, you can see every mention, good or bad, and create your strategy accordingly. That’s what we call a win-win. And, to do this, are quite a few social media listening tools you can rely on. The more popular ones are TweetDeck, Keyhole, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite Insights. So, take your pick and start listening in on conversations about you.
Stay on top of trends: Social media listening is the best way to find the topics that are grabbing your followers’ attention. And if you keep an eye on the hashtags used by your followers or the news that interests them, you’ll be able to figure out a content strategy that would keep your audience hooked on to your feed and keep you updated.
Check out community hangout zones: Just because you’ve established yourself as an Instagram influencer doesn’t mean you can’t check out other platforms for inspiration. Thankfully, social media listening allows you to find the platforms where your followers carry on their conversations beyond your timeline. Some of the other social community hangout zones (including groups, private and public chats) on Twitter, Reddit help know a lot about what your audience expects from you. You’ll be surprised by the number of ideas you can get just by studying your audience’s conversations. So, track these conversations and use those topics to increase engagement on your feed.
Social media listening goes well beyond just monitoring your reputation. You can use its insights to improve your engagement rate, better your marketing strategy, and increase the number of followers, among other things.
Agree with us? Great! Because there’s an entire audience of soon-to-be-followers who are waiting to be tapped into. They want an influencer who keeps up with their interests, provides all the info they are looking for is relatable. So, get started on understanding them. This practice will not only improve your engagement rate but also enhance the shareability of your posts and increase their reach. Remember, if you invest in your audience, they’ll invest in you.
