To sell or promote any product in the market requires an audience interested in the product you are offering to them. Be it traditional marketing, digital marketing, social media marketing, etc., understanding the users’ intent is very much essential in designing the best marketing strategies. It is not the owner of the company but the users of its products who build a brand and take it to its desired heights of success. Creating a market for a product requires in-depth research of the market and the knowledge of the consumers. Having an understanding of the consumers makes it easy to develop a new product or reform an existing product that revolves around the user’s likes & dislikes and places the user’s satisfaction on top of the marketing priorities ladder. When the development of a product is designed considering the target audience, it gives a long-lasting positive effect on their user experience and provides the highest level of satisfaction for them. Understanding the target audience is one of the influential factors in marketing and that is why a “buyer persona” needs to be created.
The buyer persona is the fictional representation of the demographics and characteristics of a company’s target audience. It is fictional yet authentic, created by conducting thorough market research to map down every essential factor that a customer might take into consideration while performing a money transaction in buying a product. In simple terms, it’s an imaginary biodata of your preferred customers collectively piled up together to highlight their similarities, likes and dislikes, preferences, characteristics, buying habits, etc.
A buyer persona is not created separately to tackle every individual that may become a potential customer but is made taking into account different focus groups with the maximum percentage of similarities. A company has multiple buyers that may fall into a different segment according to their alikenesses and similar characteristics. Multiple buyer personas are created to frame effective marketing strategies that may consider their concerns separately to tackle these numerous segments of users.
Benefits of using social media platforms in collecting data
Being the most favorable platform for internet users, building a buyer persona using social media becomes efficient and effective. The likability of social networking sites is immense and this is why it has gained extraordinary popularity and an unimaginable number of active users. So, collecting data on social media becomes crucial because of its wide scope and because you get to know the real personality of the target audiences, which might have been impossible to know on other highly professional sites.
- Gives access to unfiltered data – To build an accurate buyer persona, you need to have access to unbiased and real data to maximize the credibility of the buyer persona and help the product development and the digital marketing team come up with strategies relevant to the data obtained. Therefore using social media platforms to collect data from the target audience ascertains that you have been introduced to the data that is highly unfiltered because users on social media don’t necessarily hide their identities or personality traits and give insights into their actual lives through the social media posts. This is why using data from social media sites becomes essential for creating effective and result-delivering product marketing strategies.
- Highly interactive and shows quick reactions – Social media platforms being highly interactive saves the excess amount of time that has to be applied in market research, therefore, providing scope to generate better ideas in creating the best social media strategy from the insights available in the buyer persona developed from the data collected on social media sites. Also, after applying the social media marketing plans, the online marketing company has access to the quick reactions of the users received on the marketing strategies and time to analyze its results, positive or negative. This helps in capitalizing on the scope of improvement and coming up with better social media marketing plans.
- Early awareness of users’ likes and dislikes – Social media posts or the details on account of users provide awareness about the likes and dislikes of the target audience, which is very useful for designing a beneficial buyer persona that can provide the desired social media marketing results. Understanding the likes and dislikes of the prospects is very useful for every kind of business because then the marketing strategies entirely revolve around providing maximum user satisfaction.
- Knowledge of their buying capacity – With the availability of extremely personal insight into the lifestyle of the target audience and the kind of product, they prefer to use daily or occasionally, knowledge of their buying capacity becomes highly visible. Understanding the buying capacity of the preferred audience is very useful when coming up with a product message to promote the product for the overall development of a product to fit the target audience’s needs and wants while taking care of their pocket also boosts the business.
Understanding these benefits of social media platforms and capitalizing on them by creating a buyer persona that briefly depicts every essential insight into the customer requirements is very important to form an effective social media strategy and also better product development plans.
Apart from the benefits that the social media platform provides, there are some hurdles faced by the online marketing agencies when using social media to create a persona. These issues don’t seem too big but can definitely affect your social media strategy because there is too much reliability on social media to create an effective and accurate buyer persona.
- Many users are on social media but do not actively use it, making it difficult to collect their data and use it in the buyer persona.
- Some of the users are active but don’t share much information; thus, it leaves the digital marketing agencies with minimum knowledge about the user’s characteristics and some of the essential data pointers are left for speculations.
- Some users share information but are hardly active, which throws the same difficulties on the market research team to fill some data pointers based on their understanding to create a persona.
When backed by thorough market research and required information of the target audience, a buyer persona gives the best results, and that is why less active users make it very difficult for social media marketing agencies to extract and utilize user data. For them, the most vital users are those who are frequently active on social media platforms and share information on a regular basis.
Having access to user information is one thing and utilizing it efficiently is another. That is why even after getting data, there are certain essential points to keep in mind while creating a buyer persona on social media platforms.
- Selecting the target audience correctly & designing multiple buyer personas – The most frequent consumer of your product and their attributes are what you’ll find crucial in determining your prospects and it is essential to carefully examine this fact and carve out the target audience from the scattered crowd. Selection of target audience makes it easy to collect relevant data and create a persona that serves their interest in the best possible manner. A single buyer persona is enough to tackle a similar kind of audience or focus group. Still, every business is involved in catering to a different set of audiences that need the personalized preference separately to convince them that your product is best suited for their needs. E.g. Xyz’s social media marketing company deals with audiences that have a totally different physical placements; one focus group is situated in New York and another in Michigan. Both of the focus groups have different psychology but are probable buyers of the products offered by the XYZ company and need special attention. To lure them into completing buying transactions, creating multiple buyer personas that directly serve the interest of both of these focus groups is necessary. This is just an example based on location; probable buyers can be further bifurcated depending on their age, religion, characteristics, income, personality traits, education, gender, etc.
- Design a relevant message and deliver it through the right medium – There should be a specialized message targeting different personas from the data collected on social networking sites. It is necessary to tackle each persona of your business separately with a personalized message and choose the right promotional medium to get the maximum benefit of efforts applied in collecting data to create a persona.
E.g., Xyz company deals in providing high-speed internet speed services and their target audience are present on different social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Buyer personas of these focus groups will be totally different from one another because users’ psyches will drastically vary from each other. Assuming the Instagram users are mostly reel creators and on LinkedIn, most of them are job seekers, the same promotional message to offer them the same product won’t be much effective. Both of the focus group needs high internet speed service and also, if the company is marketing its product to both the groups on the same online platform, then its message won’t reach one section of the focus group and all the hard work of identifying the product seekers won’t give good results. Designing a relevant message and delivering it through the most suitable social media platform becomes unimaginably essential.
- Trigger the audience with an emotional touch in the promotional message – To utilize the data collected on the social media platforms effectively, try to trigger the audience with an emotional touch in the product’s promotion message. The collected data helps understand the characteristics of social media users. Understanding the characteristics is very useful in designing a message that emotionally connects with the target audience because the knowledge of their likes, dislikes, preferences, pain points, etc., is there. Also, messages with an emotional touch encourage the users to be more enthusiastic and perform the company’s call-to-action.
- Try to take feedback and capitalize on future promotions accordingly – The best social media strategy for getting the maximum outcome from the usage of the buyer personas in your product marketing is to give a scope of taking feedback from the product’s users as feedback help understand the pros and cons of social media marketing strategies. On social media, users are very comfortable expressing their views and putting forward their sentiments associated with the products. It provides a better opportunity for the online marketing company to capitalize on the feedback received and create better and more effective future marketing strategies. The company can then enhance the features of the pros and rectify the cons to suit the requirements of the target audiences better.
Final thoughts
The main objective of social media strategy or any other marketing strategy is to convince the target audience to perform the company’s preferred call-to-action that will help in achieving the maximum return on investment. Creating a buyer persona using the data collected on social media platforms is very effective and highly beneficial in designing the best online marketing strategies because of the opportunity it provides to understand the detailed characteristics of the target audiences and decipher the most critical personality traits associated with the probable product users. Access to the unfiltered data related to the users helps unexpectedly in creating persuasive online marketing plans that are more appealing and has all the necessary requirements to build a strong connection between the brand and its product users. Therefore using social media to strategies these promotion plans increases the chance of accomplishing the desired marketing goals.
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