Telegram target audience research should be one of the first things on the list when developing an Telegram channel.
To produce great content, you need to know what your members like seeing the posts on channel.
To write killer content, you need to know which voice they find more relatable.
To find your best time to post, you need to know when your audience is online.
In other words, to experience Telegram greatness at its fullest, you need to know a lot about your audience FIRST.
Actionable insights into your audience’s interests, preferences and behaviour ultimately pave the road to a successful Telegram strategy.
Question is, though: how do you find a target audience on Telegram? Where do you even look for it?!
I’m glad you asked, because, as always, you can find this helpful information on the Salvanik website.
How to Research an Ideal Telegram Target Audience
Start with bigger marketing personas.
If you’re running a business, you probably already have a buyer persona: that is, a profile of an ideal customer that you want to market your product to.
This information should be reused when defining your ideal Telegram audience — there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.
Ask your Telegram marketing team about what the typical customer looks like. Later, once you’re digging into Telegram analytics, you’ll be able to add more nuance and detail to these customers’ profiles based on your social data.
You’ve got to ask yourself these four questions first:
What is my product?
What audience do I want to attract? (Or, whom is my product designed for?)
What is my audience looking for?
And, how am I going to attract that audience?
Relying on your existing buyer persona is a great place to start.
However, be aware that your Telegram target audience might be somewhat different than your typical customer that buys from you offline.
That’s why it’s important to make sure it’s aligned with your demographic data from Telegram.
Check your Telegram demographics
When starting your research, demographical insights into your Telegram audience can be quite useful. Go to your Insights on the Telegram app and click Audience.
There, you’ll be able to see the three most fundamental statistics on your members: their gender, their age, and their location.
This is particularly important for when you will want to run Telegram ads in the future, as you’ll be able to get your content in front of your Telegram target audience by using this data.
Here, you might get a useful insight into who’s already joining your Telegram channel.
If your ideal target audience is, say, middle-aged men but Telegram tells you that most of your members are millennial women, then you are clearly doing something wrong with your posting strategy and probably need to rethink it.
If your general buyer persona is in agreement with your demographic stats from Telegram, then well done!
Now, knowing this, the next step is to understand what the audience is looking for.
In other words, what are they doing on the platform?
Are they looking for inspiration on Telegram?
Or perhaps they’re interested in a look at how the advertisement is made?
Or want to educate themselves about the difference between 9k and 18k Telegram channel?
Demographic stats would never tell you that information because they’re, well, demographic, not qualitative.
The key in audience research lies in finding out your members’ personal preferences, interests, habits, life philosophies — something that statistics simply can’t show.
How do you find this out?
Follow the next steps in this guide.
Be honest with your Telegram members
Something that you should ever do in real life, Its that definitely worth doing during your Telegram target audience research.
A good place to start is to see who are the people that are already joining you — or, better yet, engaging with you.
Go onto your Telegram channel
Click on people who joined or contacted you. You’ll end up on their accounts. From there, check what they’re posting themselves, what hashtags they’re using, and, interestingly, what kind of captions they write and the language they use.
If you find that your members use lots of emojis, abbreviations like LOL or YOLO, you might want to include those elements in your own captions to make them sound more relatable.
Who likes your Telegram content
After you’ve done that, click on your members’ subscribers and see whom they joined your Telegram channel.
This will give you an impression of what is it that they’re looking for on Telegram. They might be joining your competitors or other similar accounts you didn’t know about. Or, you might also find out that they have interests you didn’t think they might have. For instance, in addition to being your members, they might appear to be architecture geeks.
How can you use Telegram?
Simple.
Say you discovered that your Telegram members, apart from joining you, also post view, lots of inspirational quotes accounts. Then what you could do is post an inspirational quote yourself once in a while, and see how it resonates with your audience.
Or, another example, you discovered that many of your Telegram members join you. Then reach out, partner up, and create a co-marketing campaign together!
There’s nothing wrong with sending a DM to a new member to ask why they decided to join you and what is it that they expect to see on your Telegram channel. Especially if you notice that someone likes your content on a regular basis or, even better, visited your content all the time So just slide into their DMs with a casual message!
Check content your competitors are posing
Another way to find you ideal Telegram target audience is to steal one from your direct competitors.
First, identify your competitors. You can even start tracking them, if you like.
Then, go to their channel and check these two things:
What do they post?
What’s the engagement on their posts?