How-to Understand Your Audience

After your follower count and engagement rate, the most important thing as an influencer to understand is your audience demographics. Audience demographics is just a fancy way of saying “who are the people that follow you”. 

Sophisticated businesses will want to know the basics of your audience. Where are they located? Are they male or female? What is their age range? Just because you are a female fitness model from Des Moines, it does not mean your audience is from Des Moines or even primarily female.

Businesses need to understand this information because they need to know who you will be promoting their products too. If the business is selling hair care products for women and your audience is mostly male, it’s not a good use of their money to pay you to promote their products to your audience.

You can find out information about your audience on almost every social platform. Sometimes you will need to sign up for a specific account type (e.g. on Instagram you will need a Creator account for advanced statistics). Influence.co offers audience demographics for you as well which are derived from your social media accounts. It’s important to scrub through this data and really understand it as most brands have gotten sophisticated enough to at least do a basic check that your audience matches their target. Keep in mind that no one has a very singular audience (e.g. only followers with a certain age, gender, location). What matters is who the primary segments of your audience are. Are you mostly being followed by women, by males 25-35, by people in Australia? 

Be prepared for most businesses to ask you for your audience demographics and for some of them to negotiate rates with you based on how much overlap there is between your audience and the desired audience they are trying to reach. They may want to work with you because they love your content, but if your audience is not super aligned with theirs they might want to offer a lower posting rate.

Conversely, knowing your audience will allow you to seek out businesses whose products are a fit for your audience. It’s a strong way to pitch a brand by leading with the fact that your followers are the people they are trying to sell to.