You have a fantastic piece of content that you want to share with the masses. Great! But how much do you know about your target audience? If it’s not much, then you’re in need of a marketing reality check.
First things first: you need a plan. A marketing campaign without a strategy is like a ship without a sail. It’s not going anywhere worthwhile if you can’t steer it in the right direction. Not having a strategy behind your social media marketing plans could mean your content won’t get the right reach, engagement, or make its way to the right people. You may have an idea of who your brand’s main audience is, where they live and what they do, but how do you know this is accurate? Maybe this is who you want to target, but are they really the people that have a need for your product or service?
In a nutshell, persona profiling is the process of establishing who you need to be targeting with your marketing efforts.
It can help you understand your audience by gathering information about key behaviours, demographics, motivations and needs that define the target group. With this information, you can tailor your content and services to their specific habits and interests. When you have key details such as gender, age and occupation, you’re able to target your audience using social advertising on the platform they’re most likely to use. If you’re not sure how to begin, here are some tips to help you develop your brand’s buyer personas.
Building buyer personas is a data-led process. Since data is representative of human behaviour, the details your brand has about its consumers, trends and purchasing habits can give you a push in the right direction.
After you’ve analysed your data, get the people who most often engage with your consumers involved using internal questionnaires or interviews. Ask them what types of people are engaging most with the brand, and the types of people they aim to target. These details will provide the initial stage of creating your personas.
Next, conduct external questionnaires to get in touch with the people on the other side of the sales and marketing funnel. This will help you paint a clear picture of who you should be targeting.
The next step is social listening. To do this, you need to use a social listening tool that will help you establish where your target audience is on social media, what channels they’re using, what conversations they’re having and what they’re looking for in a product or service like yours.
You’ll then find that the combination of results from all of this research will tell you who your audience is, and the methods they’re likely to take to interact with your brand and your content.
In this day and age, every brand needs a strong presence on social media. Whether you’re focusing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat or all of the above, as a brand you need the right information to refine your targeting.
Unfortunately, not all social platforms offer the same targeting options, and some are much more advanced than others. Some, like Facebook and LinkedIn, allow you to be very specific with your targeting. This is due to the amount of information users provide when building and maintaining their profiles. Twitter, on the other hand, is more difficult, as it only collects limited data when someone creates a profile, and the character limits are very strict.
It’s important to think carefully about how detailed you want your personas to be, since narrowing them down too much could mean you exclude potential customers.
Once you’re happy with your personas, the process of tailoring your content to connect with potential buyers will become much easier. Social targeting can help you reach the right people, which will lead to an increase in engagement.
If you’re finding it difficult to create accurate buyer personas and optimise your social media content creation, Axonn can help.
Contact us to discuss your marketing goals.
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