5 Steps to Craft An Accurate Buyer Persona Using Social Media Data
Uma Bhat
Tue, 09/18/2018 - 14:12

As a marketer do you know who your ideal customers are?

Do you know their age and gender? Do you know where they shop? How often do they shop? Which location are they based in? What are their interests?

These are very important details about your customer that can give numerous hints about their buying pattern.

Buyer personas are not really a new thing right? It’s an age-old marketing technique used by companies to connect better with their audience. The method of collecting the buyer personas was mainly based on surveys and focus groups.

In an era of social media, there has been more access to user information that can be used to craft accurate buyer personas. With the data being at the center, social media marketers have the capability to create personalized advertising campaigns that can hit the bulls-eye.

What Is A Buyer Persona?

A buyer persona is a representation of a main segment of your audience that is generated based on the customer data. A buyer persona is created after careful research of your ideal customer.

In simple terms, a persona is a profile of your audience that helps you to understand the personality of your customer and in addition helps to understand what makes them to buy your products.

Benefits of Buyer Persona

These buyer personas are aimed at getting under the skin of your customers and to earn a good understanding of what your customer is all about.

Buyer personas are extremely beneficial for marketers to develop your marketing campaigns.

Here are five benefits of establishing well-defined buyer personas:

Offers deeper understanding of the buying behaviors of customers
Enables content creation to meet the targeted needs of each buyer
Provides a grasp of your prospect’s buying behavior
Gives the marketing team a better assessment of segmentation and messaging
Depicts a human face to the data collected
How To Craft An Accurate Buyer Persona

A buyer persona should be crafted carefully with enough research. It should start by collecting some basic and must-haves from your customers.

Basic personal information/Demographics – The profile of your customers should be prepared after taking into account factors such as age, location, gender, education, income, employment, etc.
The interest of your customer is of prime importance while deciding on the buyer persona. What is your target customer interested in?
Finding what drives your customers towards purchasing a product is the key to designing the buyer persona. Find what motivates your customer to buy from you and what are they trying to resolve by using your product.
It is also equally important to know the reasons or the factors that is stopping your customers from purchasing your products. What are the deterrents that your customer faces before finalizing to buy from you?
Once you have the basic data about your customer, then start crafting the buyer persona.

Here Are 5 Steps To Craft An Accurate Buyer Persona:

STEP 1: Create As Complete A Picture As Possible Of Your Customer

Here you start thinking and jotting down all features of your ideal customer. Come up with general groups of people who are interested in your product. Later narrow them down further based on the specific aspects of the customer that will allow you to create a complete picture of your customer. List down the reasons why your customer will buy your product. At the same time make a list of reasons why your customer might refrain from buying your product. Now based on all the factors, you are able to now identify the age, gender, location, interest of your customer, and also the purchasing concerns.

STEP 2: Dive Into Your Internal Data

In this step you will have to find the interests of your customers by diving deep into the internal data that you have collected. The data could come from Google analytics, Facebook analytics or Twitter analytics based on the social media platform that you are using. You can also use social media management tools such as Cloohawk to analyze your social media data. Cloohawk has the ability to identify influencers and followers who are interested in your brand. You will be able to connect with the most suitable audience for your brand.

Based on the internal data, you can come up with a list of interests that you could not have initially thought of. At the end of this step you should have narrower picture of your buyer persona.

STEP 3: Refine Further By Looking At Competitors

By the time you come to this stage, you already have a persona that looks pretty good. But here you can use competitor data to further refine it making it almost a perfect buyer persona.

You take few references of your competitors, and by watching their content, their social media posts, their advertising campaigns, their website, etc. you can analyze it further to get a better idea of your ideal customer persona.

Again you can do it manually by browsing through numerous social media pages or better you can use social media management tools that help to analyse competitors.

Identify your key competitors and make a list of top 5-10 competitors. Analyze them every day to know various aspects of your competitors such as the content they publish, the frequency of their posts, the influencers that they are engaging with and the campaigns that they are running.

SEMrush is a competition monitoring tool that can be used for tracking multiple aspects of your competitors. You can find out where your rivals concentrate most of their marketing efforts, discover their websites’ traffic, audiences and lead generation sources. You can also conduct in-depth analysis of your competitors' backlinks.

STEP 4: Gather From Your Customers Themselves

In this step your efforts should be focused on collecting information directly from the horse’s mouth. Though this is an old school method, there is nothing wrong in asking the customers about their interests, shopping interests, and amount spent on shopping, frequency of shopping, etc. Here you can list down a set of questions to gather information that is required to frame a perfect buyer persona.

But it can be tough to get people to attempt the survey. Hence it is important for you to incentivizing the completion of the survey. Make it easy by offering multiple choice questions and drop down menus. There are many tools such as SurveyMonkey and KwikSurveys that can be used for surveys.

STEP 5:  Assemble All Together

This is the final step in the preparation of the buyer person. Now that you have a lot of information about your customer, put it all together in a logical order to derive the exact buyer persona.

For example you will be able to craft a clear buyer persona as below:

Female between 25 to 45 years, who lives in US, and works in fashion industry.
Interests are health and fitness, weight management, fashion clothes.
Driven towards healthy living, healthy products, organic products
Reasons for not buying are price and quality
The buyer person is detailed enough to understand the various factors of your ideal customer.

With this step, now you have a perfect buyer persona. You can use this in building strategies around advertising, social media campaigns, offers, discounts, etc. and target the right set of audience. You will be able to design and post the right content for your customers.

Conclusion

A buyer persona puts a face to your customer. A well-defined persona can help marketers to build customized marketing campaigns thereby targeting the right audience.

Developing a buyer persona is essential in social media marketing. Marketing on social media requires you to establish excellent relationships with your audience. But it becomes hard to understand your customers since you don’t have the real connect.

Here building a buyer persona comes into picture and occupies an important role in social media marketing.