Find your niche, define your target audience, and create your buyer personas.
You have probably heard these terms quite a lot lately, especially on Instagram. But have you stopped and wondered what they really mean and the importance of knowing your niche, your target audience, and your buyer personas as a content creator?
Don’t worry! I’m going to explain it all in this post and help you understand why this is important for social media too.
A niche, a target audience, and a buyer persona are all terms from sales & marketing. If you have worked in marketing before, you know that these are essential for creating a marketing strategy.
Why are these terms important for content creators? Basically, by knowing your niche, target audience, and buyer personas, you will be able to create a better content strategy that will resonate more with your audience.
As a result of this, you will achieve whatever your goals are easier and faster.
Now let’s jump into details.
What is a market niche?
By definition, a market niche is ‘a division of a market on which a particular product or service is focused and it is usually based on five different segments or categories like: geographic, demographic, firmographic, behavioral, and psychographic.’
I know this all sounds too wordy and perhaps hard to understand, so I am going to make it simpler for you.
You could think of a niche more or less as a community of people with similar preferences, problems, goals, and needs.
For example in the lifestyle industry saying your niche is 'vegan lifestyle' might be too broad. However, ‘vegan lifestyle for work-from-home mummies’ is the perfect example of a detailed niche.
The more specific you are with your niche, the better it will be for your content creation. However, if you can’t be super specific, it’s totally fine too. You will probably be polishing it along the way when you keep learning more about your audience.
Why is it important to find a niche?
I know some of you might be thinking, “I don’t need to define a niche, I am not selling anything”.
While it might be true that defining a niche is usually for people who want to sell a specific product or a service, as a content creator that is aspiring to work with brands, you should really have a well-defined niche.
Brands are starting to prefer working with micro and nano-influencers because they're a lot more focused and more targeted to their followers and audience.
And the truth is that the more niched-down your content is, it’s most likely your engagement rate will be higher.
Brands know that the message they want to convey through influencer marketing will be much stronger with influencers that have very targeted and engaged audiences.
Furthermore, it could be that in the future you do want to start monetizing your social media following, and having a clear niche will make this much easier.
How can you find your social media niche?
Finding your niche for social media can be an overwhelming task at the beginning. When I started re-branding my personal brand I had to find one and to be honest I wanted to cover many different niches.
However, you know what they say: when you try to speak to everyone, you’re speaking to no one.
Here’s a simple formula to help you find yours.
Think about:
The stuff you love
The stuff you’re good at
The stuff people want
When you put all these together, the point right in the middle is your sweet spot.
Is it a little bit clearer now?
Finding a profitable niche
If your goal is to build a business or personal brand through social media, you should also take into consideration having a profitable niche.
Luckily, nowadays there are tons of profitable niches online and these are some of them:
Fitness (Weight loss, yoga, nutrition)
Health
Dating and relationships
Pets
Personal Development (self-development, self-improvement, personality improvement)
Wealth building through investing
Making money online (blogging tips, affiliate marketing tips, online jobs).
Lifestyle (beauty, treatments)
Gadgets and technology
Personal finance
Food (home-made food, veganism, recipes)
What is a target audience?
So now that you know what a niche is and how to find yours we can move onto the next term.
A target audience is a specific group of people within your niche that are most likely to respond positively to your content. Your audience is usually defined by certain factors like location, age, income, and so on.
If we take our previous example with vegan mummies, the target audience would be the following:
Vegan work-from-home mummies, 28-35 years old from New York City.
Knowing your target audience is important because depending on the type of audience you might find that instead of using Instagram, Pinterest is a better option as most of these women spend their time looking for recipes and advice here.
Moreover, knowing your target audience will also help you define the tone of voice and personality of your content.
In terms of marketing, a target audience will give you a direction to ensure a consistent tone of voice, branding, and message throughout your different channels helping you build stronger relationships with your future customers.
These are some of the things you should consider when finding who your target audience is:
Income or job title.
Family or relationship status.
Needs and aspirations.
Problems and concerns.
Which social media websites they use.
Language.
Favorite websites.
Buying motivation.
Gender.
Buying concerns.
What is a buyer persona?
If going from a niche to a target audience made you be more specific, going from a target audience to buyer personas will make you think even more specifically about it.
In marketing terms, a buyer persona is a fictional character that could be your potential client.
They are created based on your target audience research and will certainly help you direct your content creation and marketing strategies much better.
The buyer persona is someone who will be interested in your content, product, or service and they’re very connected with your personal brand.
A buyer persona research is much more detailed than the target audience as it includes:
Background: What is his/her actual job, what career path does he/she have, does he/she have a family?
Demographics: Male or female? Age? Income? Location?
Identifiers: Behaviors, communication preferences?
Goals: Primary and secondary goals?
Challenges: Primary and secondary challenges
What can I do for him/her? How am I going to help this persona achieve his/her goals and overcome those challenges?
Real quotes about goals and challenges
Common objections: why would he/she not buy our product or get our services?
Our marketing messaging: How am I going to describe the solution to this persona?
Elevator pitch: Selling this persona is my solution.
What comes next once you’ve found these for your business or personal brand?
So now you have a clearer understanding of these terms. With this powerful information in your hands, you can already start creating (or adjusting) your content strategy to meet the needs of your buyer personas, and your target audience, and that is 100% relevant to your niche.
Regardless of what your objectives are, content creation should always have a purpose.
Knowing where in the market you currently stand will help you stand out from others. And knowing how to really address a specific group of people will bring you great results.
Are you struggling to find your niche? Inside my signature program, I help content creators and entrepreneurs find their profitable niche to grow and monetize on Instagram.
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