Buyer Personas for Social Media

A well-crafted buyer persona allows you to personalize the marketing experience for your ideal customer. This method humanizes your target audience which in turn, humanizes your social marketing campaign.

Engagement is one of the most important metrics in social reporting. Our overall goal with a social campaign is to have people engage with our brand, creating a relationship that will, hopefully, turn into a sale in the long run. From crafting the perfect social message to targeting social ads, personalization (at least on a broad scale) is a must.

Brands that don’t put effort into personalizing their social content run the risk of turning their social channels into company megaphones, shouting about their products but failing to connect to their target audience. Lack of engagement is a symptom of this.

So, What Is a Buyer Persona?
Hubspot defines a buyer persona as “a fictional, generalized character that encompasses the various needs, goals, and observed behavior patterns among your real and potential customers.”

Why Do I Need Them?
To put it simply, they help you understand your customers better.

Learning about what makes up your ideal customers – their behaviors, research patterns, goals, pain points, etc. – will help you target and attract more of them.

What Information Do I Need to Capture to Develop a Persona?
The first thing many people do when crafting a buyer persona is gather demographic details. While these are helpful, all your efforts shouldn’t be focused here. Demographics overlap across multiple personas as you may find during your research. That being said, here are some of the most important data points to gather during your research:

• Demographics: Age, gender, education level, company size
• Role: Goals, success factors, challenges and pain points, who they report to, who reports to them, how their job is measured, skills required
• Work Habits:
  • Preferred method of communication (i.e. email, phone, etc.)
  • Do they use social media for work? Personal? Do these two overlap?
  • Industry publications, associations, and trade shows they engage with

How Do I Gather This Data?

1. Interview current customers
   Get to know why they chose your product or service. What problems did your product or service help solve? How did they research solutions? Identify any commonalities and use this information to develop your persona.
2. Learn from social and website analytics
   Leverage all the data we have access to as marketers in 2019. This includes audience insights on your social media platforms. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn all give you data about your followers you can use to craft your persona.
3. Check with sales and customer service
   These people are on the front lines when it comes to fielding a multitude of questions. They can be key in determining what questions people are asking and how often. Use this intelligence to gather pain points that can be addressed in your social campaign.
4. Set up social listening
   There are a lot of social listening tools out there that help marketers perform a variety of tasks. Use your social tool to listen for mentions of your brand (even when it’s not tagged), products, and even your competitors. This will help you gain insight into what the people are really saying and help you understand how your product or service can solve their problem.

A successful social media campaign relies on a variety of factors but getting to know your target audience is a huge piece of the puzzle. Using these steps, you can craft a well-rounded persona which humanizes your target customer. From there, you can create targeted messages that speak to your personas’ needs.