Understanding your audience is a vital aspect of your Instagram marketing strategy. It goes beyond having a large following or using tools to check Instagram followers. You’ll need to invest time and effort to get actionable insights into their interests, behaviors, and preferences. With this, you can produce relevant content. You can also post when they are online and maximize engagement.
So how does Instagram analytics help you identify and analyze the audience? We’ll consider all that in this article. Keep reading to find out:
Look into Your Brand’s Bigger Buyer Persona
If your business already exists, then you probably already have a buyer persona. However, if you don’t have one yet, then it’s something you’ll need to create. A customer buyer persona is a profile of an ideal client your product speaks to. Information like their age, location, lifestyle, etc., can help you create such profiles. Thus when checking your Instagram followers’ analysis, you can reuse this information.
Consider what your product is and its use. Who did you have in mind when you designed your product? And what are your audience’s demands? Let’s look at an example. A paper writing service review like Writing Judge provides writing needs for students and professionals. Thus, their target audience covers high school, college, MSc, or Ph.D. students. And professionals who need excellently written proposals or content.
Collect Competitive Insight
There’s useful information you get about your target audience by looking into your competitors’. See who follows them and the posts that work for them. It provides an expanded view of how your Instagram target audience should appear. You’ll know if there are loopholes or gaps in the audience segments you can improve.
Tools such as Keyhole, Owlmetrics, etc., are great tools for analyzing your competitors. These tools let you check how your posts perform against your competitors. Other essential audience insights include their followers’ analysis, locations, demographics, and brand mentions.
Conduct Social Media Listening
Another Instagram analytics for analyzing your audience is through social listening. It entails knowing what your audience is talking about. What keeps them interested and engaged? What is your customers’ feedback? What are the discussions around related keywords, topics, or competitors? Without such information, you’ll find it challenging to have relevant conversations with them. Or implement changes to improve social media strategies.
Besides social listening tools, you can also use influencer platforms to improve your social listening. With this, you can identify trending conversations your audience is having. And with the help of influential thought leaders, you can amplify your marketing campaign.
Make the most of Instagram polls
When researching your audience, it makes absolute sense to ask them directly. Right? You can achieve by making use of Instagram Stories. Use the polls function to ask relevant questions to help understand them better. Create polls on:
- Would they prefer to view content in your feed or stories?
- What would they want to see: behind-the-scenes content or editorial shoots?
- Long or short captions, which do they prefer?
- What do they like about your products, and what can you do better?
The response from these polls lets you know what kind of content to create. You can go-ahead to build it yourself. Or you can make use of professional writing reviews services such as Pick The Writer.
Use Instagram Insights to Check Your Instagram Demographics
The demographic data regarding your Instagram audience is also useful. From within the Instagram app, you can get your audience demographics. Tap on the four vertical lines at the right corner of your Instagram profile. It will grant you access to your insights screen. Use the Insights feature and can click on the audience. From there, you’ll see audiences’ stats like age, location, likes, gender, etc.
What I like about this in-built is that the data comes directly from the app. It gives you useful insight into who’s already following you. With this, you know if they are your target audience or not. You also see if you’re using the right or wrong posting strategy. And it is essential data to have when you want to run your Instagram adverts. However, demographic stats can’t give you qualitative analysis about your audience. But it is a perfect place to begin your research.
You Could Send a Direct Message (DM)
Some might be skeptical about making use of the direct message feature. But it is there for a purpose. It is okay to send one to your audience. Notice a new follower, someone liking or commenting on your posts regularly? You can send them a casual message. Here is an example of a DM you can send:
“Hey there! We appreciate that you’re following us, and we’ll love to know how to serve you better. Kindly help answer a quick question: what kind of content would you love to see on our page? We’re trying to deliver the very best services to our followers. Your feedback would be much appreciated!”
Make Use of Instagram Business Tools
Making use of Instagram business tools for your brand is a no brainer. With this, your followers recognize your profiles as a business profile. There are features on it that provide channels to analyze your audience. These Instagram business tools include:
- Contact button: You can link your phone numbers or email address. You can also add your store link or physical address to your account. What this does is to allow followers to contact you. You can begin to collect your audiences’ data from such contacts.
- Promoted posts: It is a feature that enables you to develop and share your posts. It is excellent for gaining visibility and engagement with your audience. And it happens within a short period. From these engagements with your audience, you can also gather and analyze their data.
- Post analytics: This analytics tool gives you a comprehensive insight into post-performance. And of course insight on the audience that engages with each post.
Conclusion:
It won’t matter if you have the most creative brand content on Instagram. Neither will your ton of followers mean anything if you know nothing about your audience. To target the right people, you’ll have to research and work on your Instagram analytics. Their demographics, interests, and behavior can help you get a clearer picture of your buyer personas.
Having this knowledge, it becomes easier to create content they’ll find valuable and relatable. You can also reach out to them directly to establish meaningful connections. And likewise, build a loyal customer base and grow your revenue.
Guest author Dominic Beaulieu is a gaming enthusiast turned tech writer who covers an impressive variety of topics like design, development process, game marketing, and helps developers with spreading the word about their creations. He is a fluent French speaker, who also has mastered Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish. He has an experience in software translation, tech counseling, project management and digital marketing tailored for startups.