Knowing your target audience on Instagram is absolutely essential if you want to get results. When you know your target audience, you will be able to tweak everything to their needs and get the best results you can imagine.
It will lead to:
- More traffic
- More followers and engagement
- More leads and sales
- Stronger brand
And way more! That’s why you need to consistently research your target audience. And in this article, I am going to reveal to you how to do it.
So, are you ready to begin? If so, let’s dive in…
Observe What’s Happening To The Leading Industry Accounts
This is a really simple, yet extremely powerful way to study your target audience. That’s because you will see exactly what people want, hate, etc. without having to run any surveys, almost immediately.
All you have to do to research your target audience on Instagram this way is to open the app, go to the search, type in the name of the leading industry account, go to the posts they shared, and start reading the conversations people have in the comments.
You will discover a lot of interesting things and you should take note of them.
For example, somebody will comment about how they have a certain problem, and then another person responds to that comment, sharing something relevant, and on and on.
Suddenly, you know that your target audience struggles with that thing because they LITERALLY tell it to you.
Oftentimes, the leading industry accounts also share a poll or create a sequence of polls as a survey in their stories (sometimes people survey even through in-feed posts but stories are more common.)
What you’re going to see there is they usually ask a question like “Do you struggle with____?” and then there is a poll.
When you answer the poll, you will see a percentage of the people who said yes and who said no. Because the account is leading in your industry, it’s obvious that it’s going to have a big following.
And that’s why when the percentage is high, you should write that your target audience wants, struggles, or whatever is the thing they asked about down because the number of participants in the poll is on 98% high, and it is relevant data.
You see, just observing what is happening on the leading industry’s accounts feed, stories, comment sections, etc. is a fantastic way to research your target audience on Instagram.
However, now let’s move on to another way to do it which is…
Survey Your Target Audience On Your Own
Surveying your target audience on Instagram on your own is one of the best ways to research it. There are many ways to do that. You can do an FAQ, you can share an in-feed post asking a question…
However, in the end, the very best way you can do it is by surveying your audience using stickers that Instagram provides you with, in the stories.
The “survey” stickers include:
- Question Sticker
- Poll Sticker
- Quizzes
- Sliders
The simplest one to use is obviously the question sticker. All you have to do is to ask your target audience something and based on the answers you will know what you need.
All of the others require a bit more creativity.
But they work and they always did, so I highly recommend that you use this way to research your target audience on Instagram.
Have A Conversation With One Of Your Dream Customers
This is so powerful I can’t emphasize it enough. When you have a real conversation with one of your dream customers, it is going to change the world for you.
That’s because you can get detailed and HONEST answers that are really tough to get when you’re doing general surveys.
All you have to do is to go to the list of people who follow you and start a conversation with them asking them a question about something.
Also, offer them some sort of a gift for spending their time. That will make them even more inclined to answer everything you need and answer it truthfully.
You can also jump on a call, which is even better, however, it’s completely fine if you do it through normal direct messages.
But it must be a private conversation.
Filip Konecny 