Who are you talking to? The importance of knowing your target audience.

When organisations are asked who their target audience is, the most common response is “everyone.”

The reasoning behind this seems logical – the more people you appeal to, the more people you reach, the more engagement you get on your posts, the more volunteers recruited or money raised or awareness generated. Right?

 Wrong.

 If you’re targeting everyone, you’re essentially targeting no one.

 This is because the content you create and the “voice” you use to speak to an 18-year-old male uni student for example, is going to be very different to how you would talk to a 35-year-old stay at home mum.

 Different audiences also utilise different social media platforms at different times of the day. Knowing your target audience is so important not only in planning what you post but also when and where you post it. (Stay tuned, more to come on this.)

Here are my tips on figuring out who your target audience is and using this knowledge to maximize the impact of your posts.

• Create an audience profile including information like gender, age, location, demographic, earnings, marital status (be as specific as possible). E.g. 35-50 year old stay at home mum living in the Western Suburbs.

• Decide what your ideal audience needs/wants. E.g. To feel valued and needed now that their kids go to school and don’t require as much attention.

• Work out how can you give them value. E.g. Opportunities to volunteer or fundraise giving them something worthwhile to spend their time on.

• Identify who they trust. Hopefully the answer is you! But also, think about experts in your sector, celebrities, and influencers. (Having a list of these people handy will be helpful when creating relevant content). E.g. Mummy Blogger Amy Zempilas. 

Now that you’ve figured out exactly who you want to talk to, you can check you’re doing it right by looking at Insights on your oganisations Facebook page.

Check out our blog post on Facebook Insights to find out how.