Do you want to learn how to sell to your customers? Have you started a website and don’t know who to sell to or where to sell your products? This guide will teach you how to develop a buyer personality profile through Twitter, it can be used to optimize your website , boost conversions and find sources for targeted traffic.
Most business owners are unaware of the personality of their optimal buyer. If you want to be successful at selling your products to a targeted group of people, you need to identify their likes and dislikes.
Clarify Your Goals – Find your Target Audience
Usually when a business owner is asked, “who do you want to sell to?” The answer is “everyone.” Recently I received a resounding “everyone” from a friend of mine who is trying to sell a book she authored. My simple reply was “you will sell to no one if you try to sell to everyone.”
There are several reasons why this statement holds true, in our overzealous attempt to win the world we may end up missing the target; our pitch becomes unnecessarily long, our strategies are messy and the results are silly mistakes such as placing ads for Maxi pads on a website with a predominantly male audience.
Let’s face it, you have bills to pay, you have employees to take care of, you have products to move and not a single penny of your marketing budget can be wasted. Creating a robust digital buyer persona gives direction, it shows you which websites to advertise your products or services, and it tells you who to speak to and how to speak to him/her. When a buyer personality profile is crafted properly it can even predict the type of objections you will face when trying to market your product.
I have developed a simple process of two W’s to help you construct a buyer persona through twitter. (This is great for new businesses)
– Who?
– Where?
Who? – Who Is Your Best Customer?
The first step in creating a digital buyer persona is to find out who your best customer is. Some of you might have a few customers in mind, don’t worry if you can’t think of any, I will show you how.
The best customer for your business is the one who bought with the least amount of resistance. The customer who bought a product or a service without any extra effort from your end is the one you want to model, if this buyer then goes on twitter and talks about the product he/she purchased, that’s even better.
For the purposes of this guide I will craft my buyer persona for a hypothetical ecommerce website selling heels.
Step 1: Find the ultimate buyer.
To find the ultimate buyer you have to search common keywords a buyer might use to find your business on Google, for the heels business a common keyword would be “buy heels online.”
**Hint: Make sure the keywords you use in this step are keywords a customer ready to purchase your product or your service would use.
Step 2: Choose your model website
Find a website on the first page that closely resembles the type of brand you are trying to project. If you will sell predominantly out of a physical location, find a company which sells most of its products in a store. Consumers who purchase online have different mannerisms from consumers who purchase at physical locations.
**Hint – when choosing a website to use for your buyer personality profile, be sure to choose one whose products or services are in the same price range as yours. If you have a high end product selling for $200 a piece it will be a great mistake to carve your buyer profile around a website which sells a cheaper variation for $20. Always look through the website you choose and make sure the products or services are around the same value and style.
The first website in my search results (Heels.com) will do for my example.
Step 3: Check For An Active Twitter Account
Click through to the website and check to see if they have social media buttons. (The social media buttons are usually located in the header or footer of the website)
Step 4: Explore Their Twitter Account
Click on the twitter Icon to go to their twitter page. The first thing I do when I get to a company’s twitter page is to scroll down a bit to get a sense of how active they are on twitter as well as the number of followers they have. Heels.com seems to be posting every day and they have 20,000 followers so it’s a good candidate for our research.
Step 5: Hunt For Your Target
We are on a hunt for people “who” buy heels, a bit of digging around must be done on twitter to get the information we are looking for. We have to find a tweet with a mention of @highheels handle or a link to their website www.heels.com. We need to find a person tweeting about a purchase they’ve made. The best way to search through for these tweets is to type the model web url into the twitter search bar and scroll though the results. In this case “heels.com”
**Hint: There are a few users we will like to avoid when conducting this type of research; bargain hunters and those who enter contests. You might find some good buyers within those two groups but most of them aren’t ready to purchase.
When we find a tweet of a person who has made a purchase, we would go ahead and collect some information from their twitter profiles. (I will use 3 profiles in this example, I like to work with at least 10 profiles during my own research… the more the better).
After scrolling a few page lengths down, I found a tweet talking about a recent purchase.
**Hint: Depending on the type of product or service you will not always find customers talking about a direct purchase. In that case use tweets from customers who show fondness or attachment to the brand.
Step 6: Collect and Organize your Data
Collect your data in a chart, I will attach a simple template you can download at the end of the post. The point here is to read through tweets of the users you select. Collect tweets that talk about the user’s likes and dislikes. Tweets about their lifestyles is also worth making note of, ex. tweets about school, parties, children, etc.
After going through the three profiles, here is the buyer personality chart I created.
The full example sheet is available for download below.
Just a quick glance at the information we collected shows our buyer is a female between the ages of 18 and 24, she loves talking about herself, loves to dress up and go out, she also likes talking about her boyfriend, she has a job in retail (Average Salary for retail sales associate is $30,000) , she doesn’t mind buying expensive objects if they’re stylish , she complains about tired feet from walking too much in uncomfortable shoes, she likes to watch movies and is a little self-conscious about her looks.
Each point in the chart can be used in one way or another, it will be golden for crafting product descriptions, landing page copy and ad copy. To sell to someone you must be able to identify their needs. If I was creating a product description for heels I will include statements such as “perfect for a movie date …,” or “comfortable enough to walk all day in…”,”shoes to wear around the office…”, “impress your boyfriend with these….,” “stand out in the club…” etc…Chances are one of those will match a reason why the buyer is looking to buy heels in the first place, mentioning “comfort” overcomes an objection.
**Hint: The best tweets to collect from the user are ones that directly relate to the product or service you provide. ex. Since I am selling shoes, I copied tweets that spoke about shoes as well as “dressing up.”
Where? – How Can You Sell To Them If You Can’t Find Them?
At this point, you want to find out where your buyer hangs out by finding the websites he/she talks about more frequently. This step would be very time consuming if it were not for a great tool created by a man called Dinesh Agarwal and his his team from Prostart.me . The creation of the tool was initiated by Mathew Barby from Find My Blog Way, you can check out his post “ How I automated a process by chatting on reddit” to learn how the tool was created .
Step 7: Sign up for Tweelinks
The tool basically gathers all the links that have ever been tweeted by a user, it then spits out the data in the form of useful pie charts. Head over to http://textfreeapp.org/TweeLinks.php sign in using your twitter account and proceed.
Hint** There seems to be a little glitch, you need to sign in twice for it to work. Click sign in, it will redirect you to twitter, when you come back to the site, click on the tweetlinks tab in the menu, and sign in again.
You will be presented with the tweetlinks interface and a field where you can enter the usernames you collected.
Step 8: Enter usernames and get links
Enter user names of the users you found for your profile. Click on the big blue “get links” button and wait for the tool to process your request. It may take a few minutes depending on the number of usernames you entered.
When the tool is done processing , you will get three tabs right beneath the big blue button, the first will be Raw urls, which gives the exact link tweeted by the user, the next is Domain mentions, which shows the amount of times a root domain is mentioned and the last is Visual Data, which gives you a pie chart of the data you just collected.
**Hint – Always make sure you check the twitter profile of the users, if a user has a personal website it is logical he/she will tweet out a lot of his/her own links and skew the data.
I am usually interested in the top 5 websites. The top five urls tweeted by our users are instagram, facebook, twitter, youtube and buzzfeed. For a new company starting out, this can give some direction on where to showcase products and which social media platforms to get active on. For an established business this technique can be used to find some new traffic channels. It’s exciting when you find websites that are not as popular as Instagram or Facebook but have a lot of your target audience engaged, those are good targets for banner ads or guest blogging campaigns.
This is the pie chart Tweelinks produced.
As I mentioned earlier, I usually try to find at least 10 users when creating the personality profile but we still managed to create a decent profile for our hypothetical heels company. We also managed to find the social media platform where our buyer hangs out. Looking at the chart, I would focus on Instagram if I had to choose only one social media platform to be active on.
Marketing is getting a lot more complex due to the nature of the internet, news travels faster, moods and thought processes are affected by friends and their opinions. This is leading to a dynamic landscape of consumers, pay attention to your customers, stay in the loop by following what they talk about.
Do you have a buyer personality profile created for your business? Has it helped with your marketing efforts?