Capturing Your Target Audience via Social Media

 

Figuring out what to post on social media can be an overwhelming task. 

It is important to post content that is relevant to both your patients and your social media audience. Thinking about who sees the content and the target audience can go a long way towards helping to increase engagement. Defining your target audience will help you understand what type of content you should be posting to your social media profiles. 

Niche Down

The first step in defining your target audience is identifying your ideal patient.

Narrowing down your audience by using key characteristics, such as common behaviors or demographics, can help identify the group of people that have the most potential of becoming a patient. Let’s say you are a pediatric office looking to bring in new patients. In this case, you would not target the patients themselves as they would be young children who are not old enough to be on social media. Instead, you would target the parents of those young children and create content that resonates with them. 

Data is Your Friend

In addition to identifying your ideal patient, another step in helping you define your target audience is reviewing current data from your social media accounts. This information is free and can provide valuable insights on your current audience and prospective patients. For example, Facebook Insights breaks down your social media audience by demographics such as age, location, gender, education, marital status, specific interests, and more. If you notice your largest demographic on Facebook is mothers, then creating content they would be more likely to interact with will increase your changes for engagement and overall success on social media.

It is also important to look at what type of content is already successful on your profiles. Seeing what your audience is already interacting with can make it easy to decide what content you should be creating more of. Whether it’s photos, videos, articles, or posts of the staff themselves – seeing what gets the most engagement and creating similar pieces of content will keep your target audience engaged.

Effective Marketing Starts with Determining Your Target Audience

Defining your target audience is an important step in creating an effective marketing campaign. Failing to define your target audience will make it difficult to create content that keeps them engaged. Knowing who your audience is and what type of content resonates with them will help you focus your efforts. It may take some time to understand what your patients are responding to on social media but your efforts will result in increased engagement and higher interaction with your content. 

As always, be sure to have fun with the content you post and reach out to the Sesame Social Team for more tips on targeting the right audience!

 

—Tyler Harris, Lead Social Media Specialist, Sesame Communications