GETTING TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE
Getting to know your audience is imperative before diving into the tactical and practical details of your social media plan. Do you know what they want? Who are they? This section is going to help you get to know them and answer some questions you have along the way.
Build Personas
Try creating personas for your audience with different categories of people. This information can sometimes be available from work you did on other marketing activities that involved segmented and targeted audiences. Examination of the individual personas will be required to identify the kind of audience you will interact with on social media. You can enhance the effectiveness of your personas by listening to what your audience has to say. You can begin to understand the mind of your audience when you listen carefully to them.
Personas are formed using the information your company may have already gathered, your own research and wider resources such as Roy Morgan’s Helix Persona’s. In order to create the persona, you may conduct subjective interviews and create surveys for your customers and sales team. Next, you may take into consideration your customer demographic, firmographic, behavioral and purchase data. By taking the time to conduct this critical exercise, you will have a better understanding of who your buyers are thus creating a more relevant marketing strategy.
Developing multiple buyer personas is a must when you’re dealing with more than one type of customer. For B2B organizations, you’ll need to include an executive sponsor, decision-maker and ultimately the user. For a consumer focused business, your persona will be based on your demographic. Information such as their age, gender, income level and geographical region will be needed to build a persona. The ideal number of personas for most organizations is between four to six. You can also opt for lesser personas for a less complex audience.
Why Do You Need to Create Personas?
You will have to spend time and money to develop buyer personas but it will be of benefit in the long run – not only for social media but other marketing channels also.
- They determine which kind of content you need: when you do a breakdown of your existing content, you will be able to know the personas that require more and the ones that have plenty.
- They set the tone, style and delivery strategies for your content: depending on the choice of your buyers, you can use either a formal tone or a gentle voice. You will have to find the most suitable style and tone for your content when creating your personas.
- They help you target the topics you should be writing about: you don’t have to trouble yourself with topics for your buyers, just ask. You can compile for each persona a list of relevant topics.
- They tell you where buyers get their information and how they want to consume it: do your audiences prefer to read long essays or do they like graphics that are short and precise? Do your audience review reports from third parties or do they like reading things on twitter? You will be able to create and disperse your content much more effectively using this information.
Want to know more? Contact Blitz Marketing today at +61 1300 893 387 or visit our website at blitzmarketing.com.au.
