How to Target a Secondary Audience with Social Media Marketing
Unsurprisingly, nearly 70% of Instagram US users are 18–44 years old. Studies show this age demographic also makes up the majority of users on YouTube and Snapchat. But for marketers whose target audiences fall outside of this age range, marketing options on the top social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube may seem bleak. Before turning away from influencer marketing all together, consider how you can utilize the prominent user base on these platforms to create content that will resonate with your key demographic.
It is important for brands to think about ways to target secondary audiences that will have a positive attitude towards your products and in turn, influence the primary audience to purchase.
Here are examples of three influencer marketing strategies that will allow you to leverage content creators who aren’t in your key demographic to ultimately reach your core consumer set:
Targeting Underage Consumers? Instead, Look to Caretakers
Example Scenario: Your product is a CPG or DTC toy, candy or snack, paid-app, or similar product geared toward children between 8–17 years old.
Recommended Strategy: For the majority of households in America, we know that a parent will be giving the child permission to purchase, along with a form of payment. By tapping into parenting influencers who have children in that age range, you are able to give exposure and life to your product with the added benefit of an educational and personal perspective. Influencers with children can share their experiences of how they came to learn about the product and how they qualified it as something they feel comfortable giving to their children. This parenting stamp of approval earns trust from the other moms and dads who may be viewing this content. Tactics like this are more likely to result in sales conversion than targeting children who don’t wield any purchasing power.
ACTIVATE Pro Tip: Leverage filters and demographic information to target the right creators: Consider what percentage of the influencers’ audience has children and how much of their audience is located in or near a market where the product is being sold.
2. Tap into Personal, Relatable Stories Using a Multi-Tier Activation
Example Scenario: You’re marketing a medical product for pre-menopausal and menopausal women aged 45 years and older.
Recommended Strategy: This is an activation where combination of macro and micro influencers can be effective to maximize brand awareness and long-tail conversions. Additionally, given the majority of influencers on IG will most likely have small percentages of followings 45+ years old, you can amplify posts across social to ensure the correct demographics actually see the content.
Your brand may want to target a macro influencer who exhibits some level of mass visibility (say, 200,000 followers or more) and has established their personality digitally with followers, fans and brands. This type of influencer has the ability to cultivate a real conversation around a product and can be particularly impactful at promoting products that may, on the surface, seem less “Instagram friendly.” In the case of our product in question, medication, the influencer could shine a spotlight on a woman in his or her life who falls into the target consumer life stage, jump starting awareness for this important issue. Bringing in a personal story of a loved one successfully bridges the gap between a product that the macro influencer may not have immediate use for, and the intended key audience. This can very well get a conversation going between followers and the women in their own lives who may be 45 and older.
From there, micro influencers can build on the momentum created by the macro influencers, creating a solid foundation of personal mini-conversations about the condition in question. Micro influencers generally have a small and intensely personal connection with his or her followers, which helps in building trust and deeper product education. Micro influencers may also be more keen to share their own stories because the macro influencer already established that behavior, and immersive conversations are what ultimately pave the path for consumer purchase.
ACTIVATE Pro Tip: After you’ve generated some strong content through influencer collaborations, you can use amplification to directly target your 45+ year old target demographic. Social platforms such as YouTube, FB and IG have very robust amplification filters, making it easy for you to make sure the right audience is viewing the posts.
3. Commit to A Consistent Content Calendar
Example Scenario: You are a luxury hotel/resort with 12 locations worldwide.
Recommended Strategy: With #wanderlust and #travel trickling into our daily feeds, Instagram and YouTube have certainly impacted the travel industry over the last 5 years. Similarly to how countries and some regions of the world have increased tourism via social media marketing, hotels and resorts successfully have gained popularity and conversions by partnering with influencers. Travel content is crucial because it is an inspirational and informational way for travel brands to encourage audiences to finally book that weekend getaway or international trip!
The key to ensuring that your travel brand content is effective is not necessarily always about the quality of the content (although certainly that is a factor!) — rather the publishing cadence of content. No matter the time of year, travel content should be published year round to keep it top of mind for audiences. Given the ever changing social media algorithms and fluctuating post visibility, higher frequency of posting good content tends to yield more impressions- ultimately leading to your content serving as a hook to engage your audience. When it comes time to start planning a vacation, your brand will stand out because by publishing vacation-worthy inspirational content year-round, it strengthened the personal interest of audiences and develops into a desire.
Create a cyclical, automated process for your brand to ensure that content-generation and publication happens organically all year long. Partnering with influencers effectively solves this by fulfilling two things: one, influencers will create beautiful imagery of your hotel, property, pool, etc. This content will draw in audiences. Two, audiences who stayed at the hotel due to the influence of the inspirational content they viewed on IG and YouTube the hotel are almost certainly guaranteed to post their own photos and videos documenting their stay. This in turn gets viewed by friends and family and growing brand awareness.
ACTIVATE Pro Tip: Before reacting on your first instinct of partnering with influencers who have slightly more mature audiences (35 and older) whose average household incomes indicate they can or are willing to afford a pricey vacation, think twice.
Consider tapping into the most engaged audience on IG and YouTube to drive brand awareness and drive sales for your hotel: 15–24 years old demographic. This comes full circle when an older family members (parents, for example), are looking for inspiration or some examples of things they may be in the market for — For this example, a vacation location. The IG popular hotel content is top of mind for a 20 year old. He/she can passionately speak to their parents about the hotel and reference the reviews he/she has read from influencers online as a way to vouch for it — this personal desire to go to the hotel can ultimately be the influencing factor for the parent to make a purchase.
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of the strategies to target a secondary audience on Instagram, FB, and YouTube. By stepping outside of the tried-and-true influencer marketing programs, any marketer can find a way to effectively reach their key demographic by targeting an adjacent audience to bridge that gap.
ACTIVATE is a fully end-to-end influencer marketing platform, covering influencer discovery, program workflow, measurement, and analytics. The platform consists of an opt-in network of 150,000+ vetted and authenticated influencers. Pinpoint niche groups by leveraging our geo-targeting and micro-survey capabilities or dive in deep with our curated networks of creators. Notably, the networks span a diverse variety of influencers including ‘vegan foodies’, ‘outdoor enthusiasts’ , ‘bohemian stylistas’ (and more!). Need a hand? Leverage ACTIVATE Studio, our in-house team of influencer strategists to build out and execute custom influencer initiatives.
Want to learn more about Bloglovin’ or ACTIVATE? Just drop us a note at research@activate.social.
