Why Marketers Need Buyer Persona For Social Media Networks?

Do you know what is a buyer persona?

Doubtless, you already know what the target audience is, primarily if you work with advertising, marketing, or have already advertised on any media platform. But, although both have a lot of affinities, they are very different things.

Understanding your buyer is vital to your business for several reasons.

First, how will you develop a product or service if you don’t know who will buy it?

Second, how will you create a publicity campaign or brand awareness if you don’t understand the pains and desires of those who can be impacted?

Many companies use content production to attract new customers. In this context, a persona will significantly facilitate the targeting of themes, defining the typical customer and buyers’ characteristics according to their behaviors.

What is Buyer Persona?

The persona is based on real-world data on its clients’ behavior and demographic characteristics and their personal histories, challenges, personal and professional goals, concerns, and motivations.

In other words, the persona is a semi-fictional “person” created to bring information with the specific characteristics of your target audience (a more humanized and personalized view). Please think of the persona as a close friend, a person who knows the main problems and will try to help you solve them.

Creating a persona is one of the most critical steps for your company’s Digital Marketing strategy. But it is not necessarily classified by sex, age, or region, but by its consumption habits and personal preferences.

These are data that go beyond numerical research. It will help if you focus on both dissatisfied and satisfied buyers. You will undoubtedly learn something about your product’s perception and the challenges your customers face in both cases.

A Buyer Persona Helps your Social Media Strategy.

Please think of the buyer persona as a pillar for everything developed in your digital marketing strategy because it is thinking about it that you will create all the content. There are several moments when your persona will be indispensable –

• The visual language of the company,
• Production of pieces for media,
• Language of content published on blogs and social networks,
• Production of text or video content,
• Language and frequency of email marketing,
• Engagement metrics to be more aware.

Without a defined buyer persona, your strategy may be lost in some cases. And you will end up speaking Chinese for those who only understand Greek, promoting meat cuts for those who are vegetarian or offering a product intended for class A to class C.

A buyer persona helps you design your marketing strategies by presenting the audience that should be focused and understands where prospects look for your information and how they want to consume it.

Create a Buyer Persona for Social Media

Based on your customer base’s statistical data or even a survey, you can already detail the character representing your ideal customer. So, to define the personas, it will be necessary to elaborate on the following data –

• Persona name, sex, age,
• Position / Occupation,
• Activity branch,
• Education level,
• Most used means of communication,
• Professional persona challenges,
• Personal goals of the persona,
• Persona’s main leisure activities,
• Who influences them,
• Where you seek information, etc.

Of course, you can add or remove some of this information according to your business’s branch. The exercise of creating a persona facilitates the future debates that you will have in your company.

We also emphasize that buyer personas cannot be made through assumptions, speculations, or hunches. Use real data from databases, surveys, interviews, and everything that allows you to get to know your client better.

The Four Steps of Building Personas

#1 Immersion –

It is the moment of chaos, the moment to dive headlong into the problem to be solved. In immersion, we need to seek as much information as possible, research, look at data, seek new perspectives, and share knowledge. To start, call the chosen group and present the project idea and the objective, which is creating personas. After the presentation, ask the group to observe their customers during the next few days and apply the interviews, as we saw earlier.

#2 Analysis –

At that time, all data collected in the immersion phase will be organized. To analyze and synthesize all the information collected, gather your workgroup, and ask them to put the collected data on insight cards. Just put one piece of information per card and stick them all on the wall for everyone to see. From there, start looking for patterns on the post-its and group them. Make the grouping both by repetition and by type of information.

#3 Ideation –

After grouping, use the technique called empathy map. Consider aspects such as age, profession, gender, and education. After this, define the ones that appear the most, and start to build your persona. On the empathy map, take the cards representing each of the aspects: what they think or feel, what they hear, what they see, what they say and do, goals and pains. Each empathy map will be a persona.

#4 Prototyping –

Based on the empathy map, it is time to define our personas. Define a name, position, age, education, and write paragraphs with behavioral characteristics. After this prototyping, we need validation. So look for your customer base that has a profile similar to the personas designed. Assess whether your personas are making sense and represent extreme user profiles of the product or service. After this process, we can use our personas to generate insights into future projects.

Conclusion

The internet is a great facilitator of research. You can go after studies done by third parties with the results published on the internet. It will complement your interviews with a lot more data.

Thus, to have successful products and marketing campaigns with good returns, it is essential to start the process with research in which guesses are avoided as much as possible.

After defining the personas, your company is ready to communicate most appropriately with your potential customers. The next step is to create a relationship strategy based on the purchase journey of these personas.

Your company can create content based on your persona’s purchase journey and then use that journey to plan marketing automation.

‍