The complete guide to finding your Instagram target audience

Your Instagram marketing strategy is only as effective as the people you manage to reach. That creative Reel you spent hours putting together? You need to get it in front of the right people to drive engagement. This is why having a well-defined Instagram target audience is vital for marketing success.

Every aspect of your strategy has to resonate with the type of people you want to reach. This includes everything from the messages you put out to the visuals you create.

Similarly, for your Instagram strategy to work, you need to align it to the needs and values of your Instagram target audience. In this guide, we show you how to find a target audience on Instagram and drive more engagement.

What is an Instagram target audience?

An Instagram target audience refers to a group of people that you want to reach with your Instagram marketing efforts. This group will have certain shared characteristics that tie them together and make them relevant to your brand. This could be anything from demographics to interests and values.

These are the people for whom you’ll be creating content and developing campaigns. And you need to adapt your brand voice, messaging and tone to resonate with them.

For example, tentree targets an audience that values sustainability and enjoys nature. So the team creates content that resonates with this type of audience. The main focus is on informative posts about the brand’s sustainability efforts, like planting trees and kelp. It also posts relatable memes and quotes for nature lovers.

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With a target audience, you can make sure your strategy is more focused and more organized in a way that puts your audience first.

How to find your audience on Instagram

So how do you find your audience on Instagram? Let’s break down the process.

Build buyer personas

The great thing is you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. You can rely on the info about your brand’s existing buyer personas to find your Instagram target audience. If you haven’t created them yet, check out our guide on how to create buyer personas.

Have a clear idea of what the typical customer looks like for your business. Ask yourself what your product is and what it does. Who is your product designed for? And what is your audience looking for?

Keep in mind that not everyone may be looking for the same thing. There may be people with different needs and motivations based on their unique pain points. So don’t be surprised if you find more than one buyer persona that’s relevant to your brand. Each of these personas can be a separate target audience group for your Instagram marketing efforts.

Sprout Social’s Instagram target audience consists of social media managers and decision-makers. So we mix things up to appeal to these two different groups.

We regularly create funny and relatable content for social media managers. Bite-sized, actionable tips further help us add value to our audience. We also throw in a heavy dose of stats and insightful content to inform decision-makers.

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Learn from the competition

You can learn a lot about your target audience by looking into your competitors’ Instagram audience. See what kind of followers they have and what kind of posts they are publishing. This type of competitive intelligence can give you some idea of what your Instagram target audience should look like.

You can figure out if there are gaps or missing audience segments you’ve left out as you’ve started putting together a picture of your own audience.

Sprout offers powerful competitive analysis tools to monitor your competitors’ Instagram performance. The Instagram Competitors Report shows you how their posts are performing and how people engage with them. It even helps you track their audience growth and compare it against yours. So you can narrow down your biggest competitors and take a closer look at their audience makeup.

Look into your existing follower data

Instagram analytics provides you with a breakdown of your existing audience demographics. This type of valuable social media demographics insights can inform your Instagram targeting.

Go to your “Insights” dashboard and tap on “New followers.” This will open a comprehensive breakdown of your complete follower data. Here, you can see some vital statistics about your existing followers, including their age range, gender and top locations.

Combine this data with your buyer personas and insights from your competitor research. This should help you paint a clear picture of what your Instagram target audience looks like.

Collect social listening insights

Audience research helps you gain a better understanding of your audience. So it’s a key step for effective Instagram targeting.

One of the best ways to understand your Instagram target audience is through social listening. When you know what your audience is talking about and what they’re interested in, you get a better understanding of how to engage them.

Sprout’s Listening tools let you pinpoint conversations in your industry and around certain topics. This gives you a better idea of what your target audience is talking about and how they feel about a certain topic.

It even gives you a demographics breakdown of users engaging in those conversations. So you can see where those topics are trending and which profiles are leading the conversation. These are all essential insights that can inform your Instagram targeting efforts.

Poll your audience

If you’re going to research your audience, why not ask them directly?

Make the most of Instagram features such as polls to ask questions and better understand your target audience. You can either use the poll sticker in your Stories or the poll feature in your Instagram captions.

Get them to vote on what type of content they prefer and what they expect from you. Or you could create polls to narrow down on the specifics of their likes and dislikes, their interests and hobbies, etc.

6 proven ways to reach your Instagram target audience

Once you’ve narrowed down your target audience on Instagram, it’s time to put that knowledge to good use. The information about your target audience will help you figure out how to reach more people on Instagram. It will also help you create content that resonates and boost your Instagram engagement rate.

Here are a few tips on how to reach your target audience on Instagram and engage them.

1. Use targeted hashtags

The right Instagram hashtags can get you in front of the right audience.

Your target audience should have interests relevant to your brand and/or industry. This also means that they would use or follow hashtags relevant to the industry.

It’s your job to make sure that you use those hashtags so that the right people can discover your content.

Make the most of Sprout’s Listening tools to discover topics and hashtags that your audience frequently mentions. You’ll be able to get a detailed breakdown of the conversation and engagement volume for each hashtag. So you can discover hashtags that are popular with your target audience and use them in your Instagram posts.

2. Localize your targeting with geotagging

For location-based Instagram targeting, you can make the most of the platform’s geotagging feature. Geotagged posts and Stories show up in searches related to the location. So this feature can significantly enhance your post visibility with the right audience.

In other words, people interested in content or events captured at those locations will be able to see your posts in their search results. Since the content is relevant to them, there’s a good chance they will take the time to view it and even engage with it.

See how Recess adds the Stagecoach Festival geolocation tag in the following post. By adding this tag, the brand improves the chances of its post showing up in searches about the event.

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3. Connect with the right influencers

Influencers have authority in their respective niches as a direct result of their passion and expertise. They have hundreds of thousands of followers whose interests align with their niche. These followers look to them for information, advice and buying inspiration. In other words, what they say goes.

So Instagram influencer marketing is the perfect way to reach and engage your audience. This would involve a partnership with influencers that your Instagram target audience follows and looks up to.

There are several types of influencer partnerships to help you drive engagement:

• Have them review your product or service
• Get them to share your content with their followers
• Partner with them to run a giveaway contest
• Have them take over your social media account for a set time period
• Get them to ingeniously position your brand or product
• Invite them to events and have them share their experience with their followers
• Get them to share in-depth tutorials and guides about your product or service

Sprout helps you identify the right influencers and thought leaders for your brand. Start by looking into trending conversations related to specific topics. The Listening Demographics dashboard then breaks down the top profiles leading those conversations. These are the profiles that will have an impact on your target audience and help you drive engagement.

4. Join in on the conversation

Participating in the right conversations is a great way to get noticed by the right people. This may involve sharing unique takes or adding commentary to a trending topic in your industry. When you add value to a relevant conversation, you can position yourself as an expert in the field and build authority.

Use Sprout’s Listening tools to discover trending conversations in your industry and about your brand. This will help you identify some of the most active conversations to participate in. Either join in on existing conversations or create a new post related to the topic to spark engagement.

5. Create content that matters to your target audience

Engaging your Instagram target audience is all about creating content that resonates with them. And the best way to understand what they like is by looking at your Instagram analytics data.

Find out what types of content get the most engagement to understand what resonates with the audience. Do they engage more with informative posts? Or perhaps they enjoy relatable memes and Reels. Use this information to fine-tune your strategy and develop more engaging content.

Look beyond the native Instagram analytics and use Sprout’s Analytics tools for deeper insights. These tools will provide you with a post-level breakdown of your content performance. You’ll be able to filter the report to narrow down the metrics that matter to you. You can then use these insights to understand the types of content that matter to your target audience so you can create more of it.

Want to see how Sprout powers your Instagram targeting? Try it free for 30 days and get valuable insights to inform your strategy.

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6. Maximize reach with targeted ads

Between changing algorithms and dwindling organic reach, an organic approach can only go so far. To really take your Instagram marketing to the next level, it’s time to learn how to target your audience with Instagram ads.

Instagram advertising gives you the opportunity to get your brand in front of the right people. Make the most of strategic ads to target people based on interests, browsing behavior and buying history. For instance, Instagram ads let you target users who have recently viewed products similar to yours. This means you get to reach people who are actively looking to buy.

In addition to regular Feed ads, consider using Instagram Story ads to engage users browsing through their Stories Feed. These ads appear like regular Stories (with the exception of a “Sponsored” tag at the top). So they blend in seamlessly with organic Stories, making it easier to grab attention.

Sprout lets you generate Instagram Paid Performance Reports to help you monitor your ad performance. Use this to keep track of your spending and see how your Instagram ads are paying off. Then adjust and optimize your advertising strategy accordingly to maximize impact.

Tap into the power of your Instagram target audience

Your target audience holds the key to Instagram marketing success. When you know who your audience is and what moves them, you know how to engage them.

The result? More impactful strategies with content that resonates and ads that convert.

Data plays an important role in informing your Instagram targeting efforts. Make the most of Sprout’s analytics tools to gather insights to learn more about your audience on Instagram. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to get started.

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