An explanation of the different and important targeting options and how to find the best target audience for your brand (Part 2)

So in our last post we have talked about the different kinds of advertising options on Instagram and we hope that this helped you to pick out the most fitting option for your brand. However if you are still unsure about how to set up an advertising campaign and still have some questions about how to define your target audience, then you should definitely keep on reading because we will explain exactly this and how to define your target audience in Instagram in further detail in this post!

Getting started with target audiences

So once you have a better understanding about what kind of advertising option there are you can make yourself on defining the perfect target audience for your brand and the advertisement that you want to publish. There are a lot of different things that you have to keep in mind before actually publishing an advertisement.

Location of your target audience

There are different important factors for advertising on Instagram that you have to keep in mind and define before you publish your advertisement. One of these things is the location of your target audience. Where exactly do you want to address your target audience? This is very important. If you are a local based brand that only sells in a smaller area or only in your country then you have to define the location for this area as well to not raise the awareness of your advertisement for people who will not be able to interact with your brand at all. If your brand is successful internationally then you can set the location for your advertisement for the countries and areas where your brand performs the best already. But of course if your goal is to address a target audience in a new location, you can select the locations that perform a little bit less than other more successful locations. 

Demographics of your target audience

Another important factor for your advertising campaign are the demographics of your brand. You can target your advertisement for a specific audience, preferably the one that already interacts with your brand the most. Important information here is the age, gender and languages of your target audience and how the different kind of target audiences interact with your brand. You should always try to fit your advertisement into the demographics of your target audience since your advertisement will most likely perform the best when you are working with the information you have. However the demographics are also a good way to see if there are target audiences that have not interacted that much with your brand so far. So you can also prepare an advertisement that will address a new kind of target audience for your brand to gain more popularity.

Interests of your target audience

Before publishing your advertisement you should always check the interests of your target audience. You can build your advertisement around these interests and you can reach people based on their interests like what kind of other apps they use, what kind of ads they interact with the most and what kind of other accounts they follow on Instagram. This is very important to get a better understanding of what your target audience is like and how they interact with other brands, accounts and apps. With the help of this information you can build your perfect advertisement and make it easier for you to get your target audience to interact with your advertisement on a higher level.

Behavior of your target audience

Just as important as the demographics is the behavior of your target audience. Before publishing your advertisement you have to make sure that you understand the behavior of your target audience to build your advertisement around this information. This is very important because analyzing the behavior will give you a better understanding of how exactly you should add texts, pictures or interaction buttons in your advertisement. You need to know which way will be the most effective one for your and your advertisement to reach the full potential of it. Analyzing the behavior is also important because you can see on which times your target audience is the most active on Instagram and which channels on Instagram they use the most.

Custom target audiences

If you already have a decent target audience and you know how to interact with them and how to set up your advertisement for this target audience then you can definitely run an advertising campaign for custom audiences. You can use this option to run advertisements to customers and target audiences you already know based on their email addresses or phone numbers. The advertisement will only be shown to the specific target group that you chose. The benefit of that is that you can see the exact statistics of this advertisement and how it performed and if there needs to be changed anything in the future.

Lookalike target audiences

Another way to set up your advertisement is to work with lookalike audiences. It works similar to the custom audiences however with the lookalike audiences you can work more openly and freely with completely new customers. This option is very good to find new people who are similar to your already existing customers and have a very similar behavior. However with this option you can expand your customer base simply by publishing an advertisement that is targeted towards lookalike audiences. Your advertisement will most likely to perform very good and you will address new potential customers and audiences.

Automated targeting of Instagram

If you are still new to setting up your advertisement and you are still unsure about how to define the perfect target group then the automated targeting option of Instagram will definitely be a good way to start for you. Instagram offers you to help you to quickly create a targeted audience that might me interested in your brand and products using a smart algorithm and working with different kind of information including location, demographics and interests. This option is the way to go for starters and you can see what kind of target audience the algorithm picked for your brand and your advertisement. In addition to that you can also analyze the statistics to see how your advertisement performed and if there is anything that can be done better in future advertisements.

Next step: Business goals

So once you have worked your way through the different kind of reaching your target audience and decided which points matter the most to you and your advertisement you can start working and defining your business goals. Specifically on Instagram you have to know exactly what your goal is before you have published your advertisement. You have to set up your business goals and work with this as a base. Stay tuned for our next post of part 3 of using advertisements on Instagram!