3 Tools on Social Media to Develop Your Target Audience

Are you tired of sifting through unqualified or disinterested leads? Your advertising might be talking to the wrong people.

Thanks to the ubiquity of social media, there are plenty of ways your brand can find its target audience and optimize your advertising. Let’s discuss three tools on three social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) that your business can use to optimize its audience.

Facebook

The Meta Business Suite is jam-packed with analytics and tools that could benefit your advertising efforts. But for today, we’re going to focus on the Ads Manager toolkit.

The Ads Manager is an all-in-one platform that allows you to design and publish ads for both Facebook and Instagram, as well as define the type of audience your ads will be presented to. Here is the “Audience Definition” section of an ad set:

How it works is that Facebook identifies users’ interests based on their prior activity, location, and age. In combination, these demographics can provide a simple method of targeting users already looking for what you’re selling.

As you can see on the right, you can even determine how broad your potential audience is. If your target audience is too specific, you’ll have a hard time reaching a suitable number of leads. If your audience is too broad, you might be spending a lot of money on unqualified or uninterested leads.

LinkedIn

If you’re marketing a B2B product, LinkedIn offers the best tool for finding your target audience — it’s called Sales Navigator:

More so than Facebook or Instagram, Sales Nav focuses on a user’s professional life. You can create lists of users using filters such as job titles, years of experience, and company size. This is an excellent method of automatically creating lead lists of the right kinds of professionals for your product or service. You can also use filters to exclude certain industries, company sizes, or job titles, which is a no-brainer method of filtering out professionals in your same industry and unqualified leads.

For example, if your company is selling employee benefits to mid-sized companies, you can specify executive job titles under the “Role” filter, exclude lower seniority levels that wouldn’t be making these decisions like “Entry-level”, and set the “Company headcount” filter to include companies with no more than 50 employees. In a few minutes, you’ll have potentially thousands of executives to reach out to!

Instagram

While those first two examples focus on creating an audience based on predictive metrics, Instagram offers a method of reviewing the success of your marketing after it’s been posted:

Other platforms offer insights like this as well, of course, but Instagram is an instructional example due to its breakdown of where the impressions are coming from. By reviewing the insights of a post after it’s launched, you can determine how well your audience targeting is working. For example, we can determine from the image that strategic use of hashtags can help you reach users that are already interested in the subject of your post.

By using a combination of pre- and post-publishing tactics, you can continually improve your company’s marketing strategy. But the tools that social media platforms provide are just the tip of the iceberg! Learn more about a potential client’s digital purchasing journey and how you can get your brand’s name in front of them by speaking with a 1GS marketing expert. We’ll handle the reporting and analyzing for you; all you have to do is speak with your new leads.