Does your company have a buyer persona? It should!

Social media marketing hinges on engagement and building an interested audience. By now we all know this. Yet many business owners, despite having built the right audience, find that they’re struggling to boost them to conversions that earn income. Often, this is a byproduct of creating content you think is right for the job, but isn’t. Today the team at Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency takes a look at how having a ‘social buyer persona’ can help you correct your content mistakes, and see the ROI you’re looking for.

So…what is a social buyer persona?

On paper, social media advertising is easy. Know who your target customer is, create campaigns that appeal to them.

So what is a social buyer persona? It’s a fictional rendering of your targeted customer, created through social media data. Of course, you’re not limited to only one of these personas- you may identify several that are worth pursuing for your business. With smart and efficient analytics, you’ll build up an idea of precisely what this person looks like- basics like age, gender, location, and hobbies, but also deeper things. Who do they follow? What’s their personality? What hashtags draw them in, and what social media channels do they use? What motivates them in general, and what gets them to buy? What are they afraid of? Who do they live with?

In other words, you are creating an imaginary character who represents everything about your ideal buyer. This is slightly different from your audience data you already have on each channel, rather representing the amalgamation of what this social data tells you.

How will this help me thrive as a business?

Obviously, creating your buyer persona is only the first stage. It’s also not universal, given you’ll take to every channel you use for online marketing. Each platform has its own ‘flavour’ of users, and its own strengths and weaknesses, and you will need to tweak your imaginary buyer accordingly. As a classic example, Instagram favours visual aspects, so could well be where you want to push aspects of your sales channels where that translates well. You’ll also need to do some balancing (based on what you learned about your buyers from the persona) of aspects like certain buyers not engaging on all your platforms- just because someone uses Facebook or Instagram doesn’t mean they’re hanging around Twitter as well. Instagram users are trying to come across as more professional than other social media platforms. Facebook users are more likely to interact with ads than Twitter users. And so on.

This does mean you need to know your buyer persona well, and also the creative tools and features open to you on each platform- but the reward is sure to match the effort.

Why you need to make your social media persona today

So a key part of digital campaign management is your buyer persona. What specific benefits will this bring you?

• Personalized content boosts engagement: Interested people engage. In fact, 72% of customers will only engage if you’ve balanced your personalization correctly, matching their interests, likes, dislikes, goals, and other issues.
• Improve ROI: Highly targeted ads that convert is the goal, and delivering the right message to the right person is the solution
• Find content more easily: Creating all your content from scratch is painful., Knowing what you can curate and repost, with similar results to native content, will help you keep efforts lower while still getting great returns

So, how do I make my persona?

How do you even begin making your social media personas? As always, begin by gathering your existing social data. Most platforms have their own ‘insight’ channel you can mine. Identify the themes you see here, especially where you can identify common factors.

Ideally, you’ll have a professional analytic suite (or a digital marketing agency) on hand to help you get more insight than just these native platforms offer. Google Analytics will also need to come on board, as it helps you determine who’s not only engaging with your content, but hopping on the net to buy from your website. This will often reveal data such as the platform you get the most referral traffic from not being the same as the source of your best conversions- and this is the key online marketing step that is most often missed by businesses. Remember, you don’t just want social visitors- you want paying customers.

Of course, you can also use customer surveys to dig deeper into your buyers. Sometimes the best way to get an answer is to simply ask! Delve deeper into what they like to engage with, what content triggers their decision to buy, and other key questions. Your support and sales teams, while they work on opposite sides of the buyer experience, can also give valuable insight into what pleases customers- and annoys them. Finally, you’re going to want to tie this together with one final metric- your revenue history.

Now you have all the data you need on hand to shape your social persona, it’s time to get to it! A buyer persona is a key part of your digital strategy, but can be an intimidating thing to create. If you’re still not sure how to optimize your personal for your business, don’t be afraid to reach out to the Zebra 360 Digital Marketing Agency team, who are always on hand to help you make the most of your social media marketing efforts.