4 Reasons Buyer Personas Drive Social Media Engagement

Your social media content should be perfectly tailored to your buyer personas. What are buyer personas? Buyer personas are imaginary profiles of the people you are trying to reach. Buyer personas are representations of your target audience – their feelings, views, jobs, buying habits, challenges, goals, motivations and behavior patterns. Your buyer personas are your most critical demographic and the entities most vital in driving your approach to social media content.

Buyer personas are the objects of your content’s energy and focus. All content you create, especially on your social platforms, needs to have one clear and ambitious destination – your buyer personas.

To uncover your buyer personas you need to do research, identify trends and create a matrix that defines and clarifies the key individuals you are targeting for social media engagement. Ideally, you want to uncover how your buyer personas think, where they work, when they visit social media, what their work challenges are and even their age, location and shopping preferences. Conducting research and allocating time to strategic market review helps determine patterns and similarities existing in your target audience. You can develop buyer personas simply by interviewing a few loyal customers, posting a few probing questions on your social platforms or even creating an online survey. Taking a good look at your existing clients – and digging deep to find out what makes your prospective clients tick – goes a long way in determining snapshots of buyer personas already dominant for you.

Think drilling deep to uncover the nuances of your buyer personas is not necessary? Here are 4 reasons buyer personas drive successful social media engagement – and should be dictating your content strategy.

Buyer personas fuel remarkable content. Recognizing your buyer personas help you create great content. Most important, the right content. If you know what content will be most effective in engaging your ideal prospective clients and brand loyalists, you are on your way to social media superiority. You will be able to tailor social updates to your buyer personas interests and challenges – even hobbies and social media habits.

When you identify your buyer personas, you identify your engagement opportunities.  It’s not enough to have consistent and timely social media updates sharing your expertise, activities and even views of the world. You have to put forth social media updates that are speaking to the right people – with the right message at the right time. With a firm understanding of your buyer personas, you can tailor social content that is ideal for your buyer personas in terms of occupation, gender, hobbies, level of education and geographic location. You can create content that is not only universally appealing, but also customer-centric in its approach to connecting with the right audience. The more you know your social media audience, the more you will engage with them – and they with you.

Your buyer personas reflect your clients and prospects – visualize them. Your buyer personas are the exact people you want to connect with on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and your entire social platform portfolio – but you must visualize them. Who are they? What are they doing right now? If you sell baby furniture, think about what time of day your target audience may be trolling your website or viewing your social updates. New parents often get little sleep – embrace that reality with fun social updates that entertain them at all hours of the night. If you are a sporting goods store, react and relate to regional sporting events and take advantage of posting visual content and videos that engage the sports fans you are targeting. If you visualize your buyer personas, you will see not just prospects – but people. Now, speak to them on your social platforms.

Your buyer personas are on a journey – take it with them. According to HubSpot, recognizing your buyer personas is the first and most vital step toward producing remarkable content. Once you identify your buyer personas, connect with their journey – what HubSpot refers to as the buyer’s journey. Make sure every interaction your make with your buyer personas is tailored to where they are in their journey – awareness, consideration and decision stages. Is your ideal audience aware of your services and expertise or are they at the stage of brand ambassador? Tailor social sharing to appeal to not only your buyer personas, in a general sense, but also the various stages of buyer journey each may be on at any given time. It may seem daunting, but taking the time to refine your social media content to best communicate with your buyer personas – and their respective buyer journeys – can result in social media engagement and endorsement. The result: More opportunities to engage more people, build more buyer personas and win over more social media fans.