Before you can start any form of marketing, digital or offline, you first need to know who your ideal customer is. You can start this process by developing a persona.

The first thing we will ask any of our SocialSmart Social Media Marketing clients is who is your ideal customer or who is your target audience? You can keep track of all your ideal customer’s characteristics with a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is an in-depth description of someone within your target audience; simply put, you make up a fictional person with a fake name and all their characteristics such as their demographics, interests, and other important traits.

Most importantly, you will want to know what their pain points are, or what they are struggling with and how your products or services can help them.

Even though this person is fictional, you will want to treat them as a real person; this will make developing marketing messages much easier as you will be writing directly to your persona.

Researching for your buyer persona

Identify your target audience

First, you will need to do some research on your target audience. Details you will want to look for include:

• Age
• Location
• Languages they speak
• Challenges they face
• Stage of life they are in
• Social media networks they use
• If a B2B (business-to-business), who makes the buying decisions for the company

You can do your research using social media analytics, customer base, or website analytics.

Further reading: HubSpot has written a guide on doing customer research, which you can check out here.

What are your customers’ goals and pain points?

These four questions should be asked when thinking about your ideal customer, or the person that your persona represents.

• What is their overall goal the want to achieve?
• What problem are they trying to solve?
• What’s keeping from solving such a problem?

One way to find out the answers to these questions is to browse Facebook for some groups and find some that may have people who are within your target audience.

After you have found some relevant groups, join them and once your request to join has been approved, use the Search button located at the top of the group’s page (seen in the picture above).

Search using keywords such as “stress”, “hate”, “problem” and similar keywords to see if you can find someone who is the real-life version of the character portrayed in the persona you created.

Now that you know what your ideal customers’ problem is, answer this question: “How can my company help?”

Now you need to think about how your products or services can help those you are targeting solve their problems. Think about your unique selling point, or USP. What makes your products or services unique and why are they better than similar ones offered by your competitors?

When trying to get the point across about your USP, focus less on your product’s features and put a strong focus on its benefits. The people don’t want another version of the same product someone is selling elsewhere, they want one that is better!

Finally, think about where your potential customer is in their buying journey and identify what is stopping them from buying your products. What can you do to destroy any roadblocks that is keeping your customer from making a final decision on purchasing?

Creating your buyer persona

Think about the following characteristics, how they apply to your persona, and describe them with as much information as you possibly can.

Background: What stage of life is he/she in? How big are their families if they have any? What careers do they have and what are their job titles?

Demographics: Basic information such as gender, age, location, income, languages spoken, etc.

Social Media Networks: This is an important one! How are you going to be able to write out a proper social media marketing strategy without knowing which networks your audience is on?

Buying Behavior: Think about how your persona would use social media to make a buying decision? Does he/she use it only for researching products such as looking at reviews or do they use it to buy the product directly? (ex. Facebook Marketplace or shoppable posts on Instagram).

Spending Power: This is where you start think about your persona’s income in more detail. How would he/she make a purchasing decision on a monetary basis? How much do they spend?

If B2B, Size of Business: If your company is a B2B company, who makes the buying decisions? What type of businesses would buy from your company?

Pain Points: This is probably one of the most important factors, as your strategy will strongly rely on this. What is the problem your ideal customer has and how will your products or services solve it, as we mentioned earlier.

Goals: Also just as important as pain points. What goals can your persona achieve with your products or services? How can they use them to get what they want done or where they want to be?

How your products and services can help: This is another important factor! If you cannot answer this question by now yourself, then you need to start this whole process over!

Buying barriers: Think more into detail over what keeps your persona from buying? Does he/she have a limited budget or a lack of time to make a purchasing decision?

Ideal content types: What types of content does your ideal customer like to engage with? Do they like product demos? How about videos? Do they like to read blog posts and articles or look at pictures? Content marketing is crucial to any business, so you really need to think about this.

Voice/tone: How will you write the content mentioned above in terms of how it sounds. How will you get your audience to relate to it? A serious tone or a relaxed one? This depends on who you are targeting.

It’s time to start brainstorming! Take out a pen, a notebook or a sheet of paper and write down each one of these items and leave space to write next to each one. At the top of your paper, write down a name that you come up with for your persona. After you have completed writing down all the details related to these factors, congratulations, you now have developed your persona.

Get ready to enter the world of social media marketing like you have never seen it before. A persona is not just useful for social media marketing, but for marketing in general.

Conclusion

We hope you have found this article useful and that you are ready to utilize social media to its fullest for your business. If you have questions or comments, please comment below or you may contact us if you interested in learning more about our SocialSmart Social Media Marketing program!