With over 1 Billion active users, Instagram has grown significantly both as a platform and an audience magnet that if properly utilized can elevate your brand or business to new heights. A properly optimized profile will drive engagement and grow your audience, an in turn send targeted traffic to your website.

Defining your audience is key, as poor quality targeting will leave you with questions wondering if social media is worth it for your business. So as a business you should discuss internally what’s important to you in a new client, and creating content that best suits that audience so you don’t attract the wrong type of leads or new customers that will give you headaches and slow the growth of your business.

Here’s 3 good questions to ask regarding your business:

1. What’s the Purpose of My Business?
This may seem like a silly question if you a business owner or key member of a business. But the purpose of this is to “take a step back” and really look at it in a different way. For example, to build authority and reach specific target audiences on Instagram you really need to “define your business’ purpose”. Taking a few minutes to do this will be very beneficial to how you proceed with your Instagram Marketing. For example, is your business’ purpose for social media to build awareness, build brand engagement, drive more sales, or maybe all of them? Going forth with a purpose-driven approach to social media with your business to ensure you are consistently attracting the right people to your IG profile.

2. Who is it that I want to attract?
After you’ve determined your business’ purpose or what drives the mission of organization, it’s time to narrow down your audience targeting. Are you looking to market to people based on their geo-location, age groups, or knowledge and experience in a certain area? You can’t effectively target an audience if you haven’t properly defined it. By going through this process and answering this question as it applies to your business will help you understand your market and be able to meet their needs more effectively. Once you’ve defined your target audience, find out if it’s an in-demand service or something people really want, as discussed in more detail in the next step.

3. What type of value does my business offer?
When Marketing your business on Instagram it needs to stand out vs. the competition. But what is the most effective way to do this without a huge budget or know-how? The best place to start is by identifying the value of your product or service with your growing list of followers and see if you can convert them to long-term customers. If you take the approach of the “minimum viable product” theory (AKA MVP), you should be able to gauge the interest (including some sales) along with collecting data from your efforts to help you determine whether you can scale up your Instagram Marketing efforts, including getting into paid advertising on the platform to get the results more quickly.

These 3 tips are a really valuable place to start with defining your audience on Instagram to have the most reach, engagement, clicks, and sales for your business going forward.