There are dozens of popular social media networks out there, which have user bases in the hundreds of millions.
Because of this, many companies make the smart decision of incorporating social media marketing into their online marketing campaign. Social media marketing has become an incredibly effective way to reach your audience, thereby helping to increase awareness and build your relationship with consumers. However, a common mistake that companies make when implementing their social marketing strategy is that they attempt to reach as many people as possible. When marketing to everyone, you’re more likely to reach no one. Before beginning to create your social marketing strategy, you need to figure out who your buyer persona is – this is what you are marketing to.
What is a Buyer Persona?
The buyer persona of your company is the overall portrait painted of your average buyer. By understanding who your persona is, you’ll have a clearer idea of who your target audience is. Remember to make the distinction between your buyer persona and who you want your target audience to be. This includes information such as the average demographic of your customer, their behavior patterns, their motivations and their goals. Figuring out what your company’s buyer persona is isn’t an easy step, but it’s an essential one.
Why Consumers Need Your Product
One of the most important elements of your buyer persona is figuring out why consumers are buying your product or service in the first place. You may think that you know the primary reason that buyers want your products or services, but you could be wrong. For example, if your business sells home automation, you may think that consumers are primarily interested in your product because of the convenience it provides. However, it may actually be because of the increased security it provides to their homes. This is a hugely different reason and will affect the way you market your product.
How to Be Found
Using Google Analytics in order to figure out what consumers are searching for in order to find your brand is a great way to get insight into how your product or service can offer a solution to their problem. Google Analytics allows you to see the keyword searches that are brining visitors to your site over a period of time. You’ll want to sort through the keywords and group them together into categories to help you figure out what types of people are looking for your products or services.
Speak With Buyers
One of the best ways to create a buyer persona is by speaking to your actual customers. Don’t just speak with recent customers, speak with older customers as well to get a clearer picture of who they are. Being able to speak with as many former customers as possible is an excellent way to help build your buyer persona, just make sure you don’t settle on a small sample size. You can provide online customers with a short survey to fill out that will help you to further develop your buyer persona. Try providing coupons or discounts as an incentive to fill it out after a sale.
Find Patterns and Behaviors
Use your analytics tools in order to figure out your referral traffic data to help you establish a prototypical audience member of each one of your social media channels. You can group each landing page by social channel via Google Analytics in order to figure out what content is most effective for followers of each social channel. This will help you better understand their preferences and patterns on each social channel.
Fleshing Out the Details
Many social media platforms provide analytics that are incredibly helpful in developing your buyer persona. For example, Twitter provides insights on your followers, which means you can explore the top interests and most unique interests of your entire Twitter follower base.
To make marketing your products or services more effective, it’s important that you understand who your buyer persona is. These are some of the tips that will help you to develop a strong buyer persona, thereby helping to increase the chances of reaching your target audience. Just remember that the development of your buyer persona is a continuous process – consumers’ wants and needs change over time, which means that your buyer persona will as well.
