Innovative ways to find and connect to your audience.
This blog won’t be an expansive list of ideas and examples filled with competitions, using video, snappy reel ideas, and more — you can find lots of those more click-bait posts via a Google search… What this blog will cover are the methods that you can use to find your target audience, and over time, build a strong connection with them.
So where do you begin? Do you know the answer to these two questions?
- Where is your current audience?
- How do they use that platform?
Finding your audience
Your target audience is a group of people that you’ve identified that you want to reach and engage with. This can be based on demographics such as age, income level, education, location, or behaviour. While not everyone will be interested in supporting a particular topic, it may be that they are more receptive to other areas that are related or loosely associated, giving you an opening to engage.
Knowing which social channels are best suited to your audience and how to create content that resonates with them is fundamental.
It’s essential that you create content suitable for the chosen platform and ensure your content has value for your audience. Try not to spread yourself too thinly by juggling content across too many platforms — focus on where your audience is already and concentrate on doing that well.
Working as a team to explore who and where your audience is
You already know much more than you think about who and where your audience is, what you need is a quick reference guide to help nudge you when you’re feeling overwhelmed or less inspired than usual. To help in your time of need, get your team together to build a picture of your audience to use and reflect on later — if you need some prompts we’ve published this free activity to help.
Using tools to help you build a picture of your audience
We don’t have to work blindly. There are an array of methods and tools that we can use to help us build a picture of our audience, whether we’re already communicating with them or not. To be effective in this and to gain clarity in our assumptions, we need to determine what keywords to look out for, and listen to the context of existing conversations.
Social listening tools
As well as working with colleagues to explore what you already know, you can employ the help of social listening tools too. These tools can be used to help find where conversations are already taking place and what tags or search terms people are using to engage with the subject.
Finding the right terms or tags:
- Tags Finder — is a free tool to help you find popular hashtags for your posts
- Google trends — is a free tool to help you understand the terms and search phrases that people are using. Don’t forget, social posts and blog content can be found on Google too!
- If you’re looking to monitor your website, the Audience tab on Google Analytics provides data on device usage so you can see how people are accessing your content, and also provides details on the user’s age, gender, location and other insights. You can also break this down into which page they landed on and whether they completed any specific goal.
- Mine your existing data. Invest time in using the analytics tools that are already on the platform (such as Twitter Analytics or Instagram Insights.) You can often find lots of golden nuggets in the data!
- You can often sign up for free trials to tools (Sprout Social, Agorapulse, Buzzsumo and more) that allow you a limited amount of searches which can be hugely helpful if you’re on a tight budget and need an immediate direction to head in
Journey and value mapping — designing moments to start conversations with new audience groups
Think about when you’re being asked to be interested, or take part in something, what is it that makes you take action? 99.9% of the time it’s likely because you see value in your engagement. Different types of value that most non profits or membership groups will be looking to connect with are: :
- Reciprocal — what can you offer in return for the support.
This is often the work that you do for beneficiaries. Consider the amount of people that donate to charities because they, or someone they’re close to, have received support?
Tactics like free downloads or gifts often sit within this idea, but they don’t have to be that obvious. Does your post offer advice that people in your target group will find useful? - Social — we are creatures of community and have always valued social engagement and social proof.
When we see other people doing something, we’re more likely to do it ourselves. When we see people we trust and respect behaving in a certain way, we’re more likely to follow their lead. Social proof is a powerful psychological phenomenon that can have a huge impact on our behaviour. Understanding this and getting support from your charity’s ambassadors can boost your profile and support a connection with new audiences and the growth of your networks. Consider also using testimonials and reviews to bolster any positive content you have that can be shared and celebrated. - Alignment — how does this bring positive change to something that aligns with my values or life moment?
The golden thread that must flow through your work will be the core values your organisation has pledged to uphold. Ensure that every part of your organisation has been involved in the ‘living of these’ values so there is a feeling of ownership. Keeping commitments to your values and actively demonstrating them in action will help you be more transparent, both internally as well as externally and this will naturally come through in your messaging and to your audience. Be genuine. The senior management team must be role models for the commitments. A simple test is: If asked for an example of something you have done this month to live up to your organisation’s commitments, would you struggle?
How and where can you show or engage with your audiences on a value level? We often get distracted by what we’re looking to gain from our audience’s interaction. We shouldn’t forget to ensure that they get some value in return for that interaction.
A great book to read if you’re looking to understand the psychology of social media, and marketing in general is Influence: Science and Practice, by Robert Cialdini
Understanding how they use each platform
Analytics — finding out how your current audience interacts with you
Each social media platform has its own analytics, or insights tool. Here are some useful tips to help you get started if you’re not already using these.
- Track your progress, start to log the weekly impact of your activity on social media. Some useful figures to keep an eye on are engagement rate, clicks, and the types of engagements. These figures could change depending on your main goals. For example; if you are looking to increase your reach, more attention should be paid to followers than clicks.
- Ask questions of your results. When you start to see things improve, or decline, look at the posts that have recently been made, and if needed go further to find external factors that could be contributing. For example, has the media been focusing on your area of work recently? Then, ask what you could have done differently to take advantage, or mitigate the impact of those external factors.
- Take a look beyond your social media activities. Don’t forget, social media is part of your digital communications ecosystem, and with that attention must be given to the impact of your social media activity on website visits, email subscribers, sharing of content from these to other social channels
- Go deep to discover the time, content type, and theme that works best regularly. As well as your weekly stats, connect your analytics measurement to your strategy. What content themes are you focussing on? Compare the impact on these different themes by time of day, content type (video, graphic, longform, etc).
How does this approach help over time?
As we alluded to at the start of this post, connecting and engaging with our audiences isn’t as simple as using a list of tactics provided on the blogs of one of the big marketing platforms. It takes work, and experimentation. By regularly revisiting how our posts are impacting our connection and asking good questions as to why, we can start to really understand what works — what they’re most interested in and feel more comfortable engaging in.
This blog post was written by Aliya Bakheit and Bobi Robson, inspired by the delivery of 3 workshops for Sport England as part of the IDA programme from CAST. The slide decks and accompanying handbook can be accessed via the links below.
Workshop slides — Social Media and Digital Marketing — Sport England x BeMoreDigital — Sept 2022.pdf
