Every marketer, online or offline, knows the importance of buyer personas.
By understanding your audience or target market, you will be able to create your buyer personas. Buyer personas defined by personification the general type of consumers that engage in your business.
Why do you need to know all of this? Let’s face it, no matter where you are, you can’t please everyone. One group of consumers won’t like what the other group of consumers would want from you.
In order to make your business a success in this chaos target markets with mixed preferences, you must face this one hard truth. You have to win just one group of consumers over the other or lose them both.
The Link Between Buyer Persona and Personalization
Personalization is becoming one of the critical factors that drive people to the business. You may have noticed its presence in the digital marketing trends for the past years now. This must mean that people are serious about their demand in personalizing content for them.
In the past, personalization for customers only consists of displaying their name on the screen.
However, now that technology and the internet keep on evolving, people expect personalization also to level up. They expect that online businesses will be able to know and offer them what they really need.
By knowing your buyers’ persona, you will be able to gain insight on what types of products and services you will be able to personalize when they visit again. Through personalization, your business can offer them what they need and increase the chances to boost purchase.
Although, how will you be able to do that when you don’t know who is your buyer’s persona?
There are many ways you can create your buyer persona, you just need to get the data of your target market. One of the most cost-effective way to search for your buyer’s data is through social media sites.
Developing Your Buyer Personas Through Social Media
First and foremost, you must identify the type of customers that usually engages with your business. In this step, gathering data is crucial.
If you wanted to reach a lot of people and gather their data, social media is the place where you can go.
According to Statista, studies estimated that by 2021 there would be approximately 3.02 billion social media users all over the world.
Your Facebook business page is one of the most excellent social media platforms where you can get essential and credible data. It has at least 2.07 billion monthly active users since November 30, 2017, with the numbers still growing, makes it a rich data-gathering ground for your business.
You can use the Insights Tool found on top of your business’s page. You will be able to check the people that have taken an interest in your business in the People and the Local tab of the tool.
The tool also shows how many people visit your page, engages in your posts, clicks on your ads and more. You can also see their age, gender, location, job title and so much more. Furthermore, you can employ a poll for your customers to ask them more information that the tool hasn’t provided.
With the demand for visual content rising among the people, it doesn’t seem surprising that Instagram, having 800 million users, had surpassed Twitter’s active user base. If you set up a business account on Instagram, you will be able to access Instagram Insights.
This tool will enable you to monitor your total impressions, how many people your post had reached, how many viewed your profile and clicked on your website.
It also features the status of your Instagram Stories and which of your posts had received a lot of interest. Instagram Insights shows you an information breakdown of your followers. Their age, gender, and the top locations where your followers are residing.
Even though it was trumped by Instagram when it comes to the number of active users, Twitter, with 330 million active users, is still a force to be reckoned with. Despite lagging behind Instagram, Twitter is the social media platform the people go to when it comes to updates and news. Twitter Analytics is an excellent tool for you to use.
By selecting “Your Followers” in the drop-down menu, it shows the statistics of what your followers are interested in. It also shows how many followers you have in terms of age, gender, location, and language.
You will be able to see what other companies your followers are following. This is an excellent way for you to check out the competition and analyze what they do for you to do better. Not only you will gather data for your buyer personas but you will also get to analyze the competition to improve your own techniques and methods.
It may not have the most active user base, having 106 million members, but target markets in LinkedIn are more than likely to convert compared to other social media platforms. As of now, LinkedIn doesn’t have analytics tools for you to manage what your followers are interested in.
However, you can still track and monitor what your target markets are interested in through LinkedIn groups. Moreover, LinkedIn is a great source for improving your content marketing as well as keeping up to date with the trends.
By discussing the trends, tips, and tricks with other LinkedIn members, your knowledge in empowering your content to grow as well as you are getting the feel of what your target markets’ interests are.
Creating Your Buyer Personas
Now that you are done with gathering data, you will be able to create your buyer personas.
Naming your Buyer Persona. To make it easy for you to remember and identify your persona, name them with something akin to their general description.
Career or Job Title. Describe what is the role of your persona. You can also state a general description of the workplace that they are working.
Demographics. Put in their age, gender, language or location. Education and household income can be useful information as well.
Goals, Priorities, and Interests. List their interests, what they need, what their goals are, and if other factors such as family or financial status affect their lifestyle.
Once you’re done, your more or less going to come up with these examples:
- Businessman, father of 2 to 4, age 34-48, city, beer
- Millennial, female, age 20-35, city, into fashion and fitness
After making your buyer persona, creating personalized marketing pitches that cater to them would become easier.
This will not only catch their attention but it will also make the chances of making them want to purchase your products.
In Conclusion
Buyer personas are an important factor to consider to make your business effective.
Despite its importance, it is also one of the things that businesses and companies often underestimate. By ignoring the development of buyer personas for your business, you will lose the chance to be able to understand what your customer really need from you.
Take the infamous rebrand of Gap in 2010.
They launched a new logo in hopes of attracting younger targets by looking hip and trendy for their modern design clothing. Since Gap failed to know their customers’ behaviors and personas, they have angered existing customers which prefer the old logo.
They lost millions of investment from that new logo only to return to their old one. It may have been unfortunate for Gap, but their mistake served as a lesson to other businesses and showed the importance of knowing your audience.
