You need to have a clear focus when choosing the right Instagram target audience for your account. This ensures that you can meet the account objectives, whether it’s to get more sales or attract brand sponsorships. Also, you want audiences to genuinely find your content interesting. 

In this article, we’ll share some of the best tips you need to target specific internet users on Instagram. This includes things like considering the interests of your demographic and building a persona.

How To Find Your Target Audience on Instagram

Now, let’s turn our attention to how to find your target audience on Instagram. There is a wide range of strategies that you can deploy, and using a mix helps get active users. Therefore, you can increase the quality of your followers, which can match your objectives. This might be to sell more products or get more account growth. 

1. Build Your Target Persona

You can start by building the target persona by taking into account various demographics. This can include age, geographic location, gender, annual income, interests, and more. Therefore, you can better understand what type of followers are the best match for your account. 

You can build personas based on the type of business you have. Therefore, the hard work you do to get new Instagram followers can lead to buyers. You may already have detailed buyer personas from research you’ve done elsewhere. This step is simply done during the building of a brand. 

2. Use the Right Hashtags

You can use Instagram hashtags to increase the audience targeting of your content. This ensures that you can narrow down the type of followers you get to match your objectives. However, there are multiple strategies you can deploy to increase the quality of your hashtag approach. Here are some of the top ones you should keep in mind:

• Limit the number of hashtags: You may think that more hashtags are better on a single post. However, this is the wrong approach since it detracts from the quality of your content. Instead, 4-5 good quality hashtags are a better approach. You can create more content and use additional hashtags if you have a large library of them. 
• Instagram Insights: Take advantage of the analytics in the Instagram Insights dashboard to figure out the top-performing hashtags. These can help you figure out what hashtags you can double down on in the future. Note that Instagram Insights is only available for professional accounts. This includes business and content creator accounts. 
• Seasonal hashtags: You’ll be pleasantly surprised by the popularity of seasonal hashtags. You can target audiences with these to get more sales or followers. However, you need to research these hashtags in advance of the seasonal time.

3. Connect With Instagram Influencers

Locate Instagram influencers with the target audience you want to find. Then, you can piggyback off their success by getting exposure to the audience. To find influencers with the right target audience, you can use hashtags. However, you’re likely to know many of the top influencers in your niche already. 

Create a contacts list where you can collaborate on content together. This can be an Instagram live stream or collaborate on posts. Therefore, you can get a lot of new followers from their audience. However, this is only effective when the influencers have a big overlap with the type of audience you’re targeting. 

4. Choose the Right Topics

Focus on creating content for your target audience, and they will naturally find your account. For example, if you want to find audiences who want cooking tips, then you need to create recipe-type content. This will help you control the type of followers that you generate. Hence, you can match the target audience with your interests or account goals. 

Are you struggling to come up with content for your Instagram account? Here are some of the top ways that you can find topics to get the right target audience:

• Consider your passion: Choose content that aligns with your passions, and you’ll get an audience that loves your content. That’s because the passion will shine through, and your content quality will increase. 
• Your business: You can create content that’s related to your business’s industry. This might be the latest trends or news your audience has an interest in.
• Niche adjacent content: Consider niches not directly related to your products but that your audience may want to know about. For example, if you are selling fitness products, you can target supplement-related content.

What Instagram Follower Demographics to Consider

Let’s take a deeper look at the different Instagram follower demographics you need to think about when targeting audiences. This will help you come up with the right buyer persona. Note that the buyer person can be different for various products and services. 

• Age: You need to think about the average age of your demographics to determine the marketing format. That’s because you want to use lifestyle imagery that correlates to the average age of your buyer. This ensures the marketing material is more effective. 
• Geographic location: The location of your Instagram audience may be crucial for how you market your products. In fact, you may want to focus on a small segment of the audience with a particular location. This allows you to increase the conversion rate for products where the location is important. For example, when you have stores with customers only coming locally. 
• Annual income: You may want to target social media users with a certain annual income. That’s because you might be selling high-ticket items. Also, your marketing for different income brackets might differ. 
• Gender: You may want to consider the gender of your average users. For some niches, this might not be a concern if you have unisex content. However, some industries tend to sway more towards one gender. 
• Time spent on social media: Try to gather data about the average amount of time your users spend on social media. This will give you insight into what type of content to create. For instance, Instagram Live is long-form content, and Instagram Reels is the opposite. 

How To Target Competitors Followers on Instagram

Do you want to know how to target competitors’ followers on Instagram? There are different strategies to target the same Instagram users as your competitors. This is a good shortcut for beginners if they want to catch up to established Instagram accounts. Your competitors might be researching your audience, so you need to do the same to remain competitive.

1. Use the Same Hashtags

Look at the hashtags your competitors are using and make a note of the ones on the highest-performing posts. It might be the case that a lot of the traffic is coming from those hashtags. Therefore, you need to add those same hashtags to your own content. 

This can increase your followers since users who find your competitors may also find your content. However, the Instagram algorithm is more complicated since relevance also plays a factor in the search results that are provided. 

You can use hashtags on content like Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels. However, the marketing strategy for each should differ. That’s because each audience has different characteristics. 

2. Collaborate With Competitors

If you can beat your competitors, then join them by taking part in collaboration events. For example, you can do cross-over content where followers of one account are exposed to the other. This is an organic and natural way to get followers from your competitors. However, you may also lose some followers to your competitors. 

That’s why it’s important to be unique on social media platforms like Instagram. This means your target audience for Instagram has a reason to follow you and your competitors. Therefore, it’s important to identify what strategies competitors are using so you don’t overlap too much. 

3. Competitor Post Comments

You can take a look at the comments section of your competitor posts to spot the loyal followers. You might see the same names leaving comments, and you can bet these are followers. However, this strategy requires more manual input since it can take a while to scan through the different post comments.

Instagram Target Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

You don’t need to make the same mistakes that countless other users have made before you. This ensures that you can hit the ground running and avoid undoing your hard work. With that thought in mind, here are some of the biggest Instagram target marketing to avoid:

• Don’t break Instagram community guidelines: Make sure to avoid breaking the Instagram community guidelines when targeting. For example, you cannot harass users or use language that’s inappropriate. Also, the images you use must be suitable for all users, including minors. 
• Don’t have a narrow focus: While creating a target profile for your audience, make sure you aren’t too narrow. That’s because you may alienate a large number of followers, which limits your growth potential. You can create other Instagram accounts if you want to target smaller audiences with your marketing efforts. 
• Don’t target the wrong audience: You need to consider your goals and target an audience that allows you to meet them. For example, when selling fitness products, you need to look for audiences who enjoy fitness. This ensures that you can increase your conversion rate. 
• Don’t set your account to private: It’s harder to gain followers with a private Instagram account. That’s because the audience cannot access a preview of the content. This limits your ability to attract new followers of your target audience.

Instagram Target Audience: Is It Hard to Master?

You can target specific audiences on Instagram without much difficulty with the tips in this article. The trick is knowing your buyer persona and what audiences can help meet your objectives. You may already understand your audience in-depth if you have built the brand on other platforms. 

Now that you understand how to find the Instagram target audience, you can try the features for yourself. Pick one of the strategies in this article, and don’t move on until you have a strong grasp. Then, you can move forward to the others to increase the effectiveness of your targeting. 

Are you having trouble getting followers with your Instagram target audience? Then, you can take advantage of the services here at snsflow.com. We specialize in boosting Instagram accounts to the next level. So what are you waiting for? Use snsflow.com to grow your Instagram account.