If you want to use Instagram to help your business go further and make more sales, then working out your buyer persona is essential.
You can do this through selling on Instagram and using the tools they offer to target your desired audience.
As well as getting valuable feedback through user engagement and A/B testing, we also show you why creating quality content is ‘make or break’ for creators on the Instagram platform.
What Is A Buyer Persona?
A buyer persona can be established from market research, data about your current customers, and expectations in the current market.
It’s a semi-fictional representation of your ideal marketing demographic. It helps you focus on the audience you want to sell your products or services to.
Here are some examples of buyer personas to create your own for your own business needs.
Stay-at-home moms
The first example we have here is a stay-at-home mom.
- Stay-at-home moms tend to spend a lot of time on the internet, so Instagram is a great place to market products to them.
- They also tend to go off visual marketing and seeing how things work and make a difference.
- Visual and personalized marketing is one reason Mrs. Hinch is so popular, as she shows the differences on a video of the products she uses, which is why the sales of these products increased so much.
- They don’t always have a lot of disposable income, so an ideal audience for budget-friendly offers and shops.
Management career-focused worker
In this example, you’re selling products that are great for the typical working person. You can focus on people in management positions to target their bigger budgets. On the other hand, you might focus on B2B sales or offer a product that would make business managers’ lives easier and less stressful.
It is excellent to think about what kind of times your persona will be active on social media. Lunchtime might be a perfect option as they will be scrolling through their phone consuming content during their break from a busy day.
Because your manager persona has a lot more disposable income, higher-priced products aren’t an issue. In this case, you can sell online to the demographic that suits your business and suits the customer.
Things you’ll want to include in your buyer persona are their name, age, location, business background (like job title), and how high up they are in their business. You’ll also want to describe their typical day’s schedule to see when they would be looking to do any Instagram shopping.
Selling On Instagram
You can pretty much sell anything on Instagram.
A lot of people use it to help their businesses. You can find all sorts of things, such as the food you can buy from small businesses, cafes and small food shops. You can also buy things like home decor and handmade items, which are very popular, especially during holidays.
You can link up your website, Etsy, and online shops to your Instagram account, so everything is available to buy straight through the Instagram automation tool.
Many people also sell services on Instagram
Marketing on Instagram can be excellent for influencer marketing, virtual assistant services, and helping people perform on Instagram and sell more of what they want.
People are searching more online for handmade items since they want to support small businesses during the pandemic, instead of big business chains. Because of this support, new startups and small businesses from all different industries are growing their audience and client base solely on social media.
With travel restrictions in place, social media ads were the only option for growth. And with so many people laid off or with hours reduced, starting up a side hustle or new business has become popular.
In October 2020, according to SEMrush, there were 1.2 billion unique visitors who were active on Instagram, and 9 out of 10 people on Instagram follow a business account of some sort on the app.
Instagram age demographics
As of 2018, there were 90 million people who would tap on Instagram product tags every month. These are incredible numbers. The most significant age demographic on Instagram is 25 to 34 year-olds, not far behind the 18 to 24-year-old age bracket.
In both of these age ranges, men outnumber women ever so slightly. However, in the 35+ age range, women outnumber men, so the stay-at-home mom buyer persona is a good indicator on this one.
The Instagram demographics are very close according to gender, with 49% of all Instagram users being male. Women are slightly ahead, with 51% of all users on Instagram.
You can get excellent insight to see what Instagram users’ interests are, but their interests will change over time
Research carried out on Instagram users’ interests found the top interest categories to be travel, music, food, and drink.
For example, parents in the United Kingdom mainly searched for food, beauty, travel, fashion, and one of the more apparent interests, parenting.
As people get older, their interests will change, so as their primary age range demographics grow, the shift in parts will reflect this. Beauty and fashion on Instagram are becoming one of the most significant interests. The same demographic might slowly shift its attention to parenting and home improvements or decor.
World events will also change user interests. When the Black Lives Matter movement started, people became more aware of the effects of their purchases. Users searched with persistence seeking to support black-owned businesses, big and small. Small companies on Instagram owned by Black, Asian, and minority ethnic users had a significant spike in engagement and sales.
People will shift with the trends of what other people are buying, so Instagram influencers can significantly impact these changes and fluctuations. Increasing sales and business go hand-in-hand with a growing influence on social media platforms and brand development.
For example, in the UK, the celebrity and Instagram influencer Stacey Solomon is on a mission to support small companies. She promotes what she has bought from a small business and shows how it looks in her home on Instagram.
When Stacey buys a new product, it’s common to see a massive spike in follower engagement for these businesses’ Instagram accounts. It often happens that these businesses end up selling out of a lot of their stock.
Instagram influencers have a lot of power and influence within the app and can help businesses go viral.
Targeting High Interest
High-interest groups are smaller segments of customers who have shown direct interest in your brand. They may have clicked on your website or interacted with one of your ads. Instead of purchasing your product, something caused them to change their mind.
These high-interest buyers might have initially retreated because of your prices.
If you’re now offering a discount code or offer, you can target those people. Your goal is to bring them back in as potential customers and convert them into paying customers.
This process of upselling is better if you target the users with the most interest only. It is almost always better to target your current audience for future sales versus new prospects.
People who engaged or purchased from you before are the demographic most likely to buy again. Your ad value will probably be highest if you turn your focus to them.
How To Use Statistics On Instagram
Facebook owns Instagram, so you’ll use Facebook statistics to determine your Instagram demographics. These statistics can show you all about the people who follow you, which you can use to create your buyer persona.
Then you can alter any marketing strategies to suit their needs and get your products noticed more by them.
You can see the age range, gender, location, and when they are online most of the time.
You can create paid ads on Instagram directly from your Instagram account.
When you create paid ads, you can target a specific audience to use this to your advantage to focus on your buyer persona and make sure the right people see your ad.
You can base the ad demographics on age, gender, and interests, so if they regularly search for something you sell, you can make sure they see your ad on their feed.
Use A/B testing
A/B testing is beneficial for all businesses involved in Instagram sales. A/B testing is where you show people two or more variants of the same ad.
The better-performing ad informs you of how to change your products or ads for the better.
If you can afford to run multiple ads at once, you can essentially let the people vote on what they like best, just by looking at the ad’s performance metrics.
You can do this on Instagram with ease and have many different ways to get first-hand feedback from people interested in you, your brand, and your products.
Running A/B testing can help make your business grow and be more successful. If you use Instagram stories, which many people interact with, there is a poll option also.
You can use polls to show off two products or two ideas and ask your audience to choose which one they would buy or are more interested in. Although it doesn’t always mean that all those who voted would buy that specific product, you can then use these poll results to see what new products your customers might want you to develop.
User Testing
User testing is where you implement a process where real people can use your product, app, or website, while you collect data. You can run experiments and determine the best ways to focus your product, ads, and brand, especially for particular customers.
The experience your customers have might not be the one you intend. With user testing, you can identify issues you wouldn’t usually detect using simple analytics.
You can have a specific set of users try out your app and find problems
With this method, you give the users instructions to perform with the app and watch them with cameras or screen-recording software to see how they follow your instructions.
You can choose tasks that are critical for your paying users to make the best of your product. Knowing that these tasks are intuitive and easy to accomplish assures you that you don’t need to make significant changes to your product.
On the other hand, if your user tests come back negative, you can understand what changes you need to make and where to focus resources to optimize your intended audience’s product.
A type of user testing that doesn’t include instructions is called behavioral analytics
It works best for web apps, native mobile apps, or websites. Special back-end software can continuously collect, track, and assess data about how users behave with your product.
You can then use this data to determine what preferences the users have. Like user testing, behavioral analytics insights show potential actions for you to fit your customers better.
Behavioral analytics is similar to Google Analytics or other in-page data, but you can also track where users scroll, click, or hover their mouse cursor.
You can segment them by how interested they are, simply by looking at how much they scroll. And you can still see user demographic data, so you can create and refine demographic segments that accurately describe your most enthusiastic users.
Competitive Monitoring
Several monitoring tools like Ahrefs, Hootsuite, and Awario allow you to monitor your competitors’ sales data. You can monitor your competitors’ strategies by collecting their online posts, news releases, and more.
You can use this monitoring data to your advantage, for example, to schedule your content to go live at the best time to suit your audience.
Your competitors might need to do expensive target audience analysis to determine these times. Why not build off of them?
You can also see what trends are currently going on. Monitoring tools show what people are talking about and searching for most of the time. You can incorporate these topics into your planning so you can take advantage of increasing interest in new ideas.
Unfortunately, many bot and fake accounts exist which degrade the experience for businesses and social media platforms. But Facebook has made changes on their platform and Instagram, which effectively find these accounts and disable them.
Today’s social media monitoring tools have a hard time pulling in Facebook or Instagram data, so for the moment, a natural person is required to perform competitor analysis on these platforms.
Content Quality
One of the best ways to get your message across and attract people to your page is by having top-quality content.
When it launched, Instagram was all about pictures, but with IGTV, reels, and stories, videos are now one of the best ways to attract people to your page.
By using video editing tools, you can significantly upgrade the quality of your content marketing. Using tools like Adobe Illustrator, Canva or an Adobe Illustrator Alternative, you can upgrade the visual aesthetic of your post.
Many people are drawn in by aesthetically pleasing posts and videos, so having the right video with the right filter, music, and quality can be a game-changer for your business.
It’s essential to learn what your competitors are doing, but you don’t want to copy them. See what they are doing and focus on what they aren’t doing, so you can do better and offer people something they aren’t.
Having a buyer persona is beneficial for your business as it can help you find your target audience to sell on Instagram.
Instagram is a vast pool of users and potential customers. It is a great way to get products in front of your buyer persona, specifically with all of the ad filters Instagram has available to business accounts.
By running Instagram ads, you’ll always learn some insight into what people do.
You’ll know more about what customers might prefer to see from using different analytics tools. And with all of the various engagement options on Instagram, you can learn directly from your customers’ polls and live streams.
Moreover, with specialized content editing tools, you can improve your video and image content, attracting more users to your beautiful brand.
Takeaway
When all of these techniques combine, yes, you can reach your perfect persona customer ready to buy your product. And if you’re listening to these customers, they too will finally arrive at the ideal product, tailored just for them.
