How to Create Social Media Buyer Personas and Use Them

Social Media Marketing is all about building relationships with real people to drive engagement, traffic, leads and sales for your business. Creating social media buyer personas is a key component of every successful social media strategy especially when operating in a social world.

However, most business owners struggle with thinking about their social media buyer personas as real people. We often think demographically with respect to common traits like age and gender but as we know, psychology is one of the biggest determinants in a successful social media marketing strategy and campaign.

Buyer Personas Free Template

What Are Buyer Personas?

 

In layman’s terms, a social media buyer personas are a profile the represents your ideal customer(s). These buyer personas are utilized to understand all information you can gather on your customer to understand exactly who they are. Later, your buyer personas will be used to market and advertise to this customer as well as people who are very similar.

When putting together your social media strategy, buyer personas help you draw the map to getting your product/service in front of your ideal customers through social media networks.

Tactics are put into place with content that will be directed at each buyer persona to grab their attention and move them through the buyer’s journey. Understanding your ideal customer completely will help you tailor specific messages through promotions, ads, offers, and more dependent on the social network in which you wish to engage with them.

Some important points to take into consideration when creating your social media buyer personas are:

 

  • How your customers respond to new and/or unfamiliar brands, products, or services
  • How your buyers are interacting with social media on a daily basis
  • If you business sells to the consumer, you’ll want to direct your personas on a personal level whereas if your buyers are businesses, you’ll create your personas on a professional level

Creating a Buyer Persona

Ideally, the best social media buyer persona is going to be created with a combination of research and insight into your businesses customers. Essentially, you objective is to create a real life example of a customer that embodies a segment of your target audience.

We always suggest looking at your previous customers and/or CRM as a starting point when conducting research. From this data, you should be able to have a general demographic of who your target audience is.

Information that is relevant here would be the following:

Buyer Persona Demographics:

  • Name
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Marital Status
  • Education
  • Salary or Household Income
  • Family Size
  • Location: are the urban, suburban, or in a rural area

Now you may not have all this information from your CRM or customer records and that is perfectly okay. However, it provides a starting point where you can begin to cluster customers based on the information you have.

Once you have this information, it is a great idea to create a survey for your previous customers to fill out (warning, you will not get results from all of them; however, if you provided a great service for your customer, they may be willing to provide you with information). Information you would want to collect from your customer survey would be the following:

Professional:

  • Job title
  • Company
  • Time with employer

Goals and Challenges:

  • What their short term and long term goals are
  • What their short term and long term challenges are (should be related to their goals)

Values and Pain Points:

  • What do they value (personal values if B2C, professional values if B2B)
  • What are their pain points (what makes their life/job more difficult)

Hobbies and Interests:

  • What their hobbies are
  • What their interests are

Other Useful Information:

  • Most used social media platform
  • Favorite blogs, pinterest boards, etc.
  • Favorite TV shows and movies

From this information, you can construct well rounded social media buyer personas that will provide you with insight into who your consumers are so you can formulate social media strategies around them. It should be noted that customer surveys receive the best response when being open and honest with the recipients. Be sure to let your customers know why you’re collecting this information.

A great note to add to your survey delivery message is:

“Hi [insert customer name], this is [insert your name] at [insert your business]. We’re conducting a survey with our previous customers to get to know them better. We’re always working on new ways to provide a better customer experience for you in the future. If you have a free moment, this survey should only take 5 minutes of your time.”

This directly informs them why you want their personal information. It is also great to note how long the survey will take. No one likes to sit down for a survey that takes 20 minutes to complete and is navigationally cumbersome.

How to Use Social Media Buyer Personas

In many circumstances, business owners can create great buyer personas but when it comes time to put them to use, things get a little more difficult, especially when incorporated on social media networks.

“When you combine the Buyer Profile with Buying Insights, you will have clear guidance for the decisions you need to make to win their business.” – Adele Revella

Several techniques you can use from your buyer personas to generate high-impact social posts:

 
1. Communicate in a way your customers respond to

Do your customers enjoy questions and/or debates that require deeper thought? Are they enticed by adventure or do they enjoy the simple things in life? Knowing what your customers are posting on social media and how they engage with their friends/followers is highly influential in your social media success. Using this information, you can drive posts and topics that your audience will engage with and get them to interact with your business and brand.

 
2. Get tips from industry competitors

We don’t believe copying people is a good thing; however, taking note on what type of content and posts your competitors and industry leaders and getting the most success on is very informative. Even collecting information on what is not working can save you a lot of time and effort. Make notes on the creative aspects as well as topics industry leaders are posting and how they’re performing. Utilize this information when crafting your daily social posts.

 
3. Directly address buyer frustrations

Why are your customers frustrated? This could be a small issue or a major problem. Address these pain points directly with thought leadership, insight, and related content that solves your customers problem(s). This will improve your credibility with buyers by showing them you genuinely want to help them without anything in return. They’ll also begin to perceive you as an industry expert when you’re able to successful solve their frustrations.

 

4. Talk about the solution your product/service provides

It’s safe to say that every business exists to provide a solution to some target audience. You should capture the best qualities and characteristics of your product/service and how it benefits the customer. At least half of your social media output should be discussing what makes your product/service special. Remember, customers don’t want to be sold to, they want to feel empowered and informed. Keep this in mind when making product/service posts. Many engagements are lost when discussing a businesses products/services because they’re focusing too much attention towards the sale rather than the product.

 

5. Create content your buyers are likely to share

Your buyer personas should be filled with information that directly relates to your target audience. Mix up your post content to satisfy the many different psychological traits of people. Add humor, entertainment, a powerful story, the “awwww” factor, etc. to your posts that entices people to share your content with friends. One of the greatest benefits of social media is the ability to spread word of mouth at a rapid rate. If you can relate the characteristics in your buyer personas with your audiences psychological trends, you have the potential to increase new business from new customers.

Social media networks are highly relevant and offer supreme benefits to businesses to increase their sales. However, if you don’t know how to communicate with your customers via social platforms, you’ll never be able to maximize the benefits for these networks.

Social media buyer personas help you create a road map between your business product/service and the customers who buy them. The only question is, what are you waiting for?

Download our FREE Buyer Personas Template for social media now to get started.

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