Learn how to make a more comprehensive ideal customer persona with social listening and analytics.
In a digital world, the competition is fierce. It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to your brand, let alone actually buy from you.
When starting out in marketing, it’s tempting to just jump right into making ads and other content without considering who your target market is or what they want. But this approach can be disastrous for your business. If you’re not hitting the right notes with your customers, then all that hard work could go down the drain when they decide not to buy your product or service after all.
But if you want to succeed, you must understand your buyer personas better than anyone else—including your competitors. That means listening to what they say and observing how they behave. And that’s where social listening comes in.
Social listening helps you learn about your target audience through online conversations about their needs, interests, and preferences. You can use this information to build a better understanding of who they are as individuals or groups and how best to engage with them across channels like email marketing and social media advertising (among others).
So what can you do?
Well, if you want to make sure that every campaign hits its target audience in exactly the right way, then you need personas—precise descriptions of who exactly your ideal customer is and what they want from a company like yours. You also need those personas alongside a clear definition of your target audience—this helps ensure that once you’ve got them in place, they’ll make sense when applied to real-world situations.
Why should brands create buyer personas?
When trying to build a brand, one of the most important things you can do is understand who your audience is. When you’re developing products and messaging, you must know who will be receiving that message and how they’ll react to it. Buyer personas are a great way to do this.
A buyer persona is a fictional character that represents a member of your target audience. Buyer personas help brands understand what motivates their customers to better tailor their messaging to them. It should include details like age, gender, location, income level, interests, and hobbies, as well as information about their goals and challenges.
Buyer personas are important to brands and marketers because they act as a guide to understanding the voice of their customers. Buyer personas are not just important for marketing; they can be used in all aspects of business strategy and development. They can help shape everything from product design to new business models. Buyer personas can also be used by sales teams for more effective sales pitches by understanding who your customers are and what matters most to them when making purchasing decisions.
In addition to helping you understand who your audience is, buyer personas help you understand what they want, how they like to consume content, and what kind of tone resonates with them best.
You can use this information as a guidepost when creating content or deciding on strategy—for example, if you see that your persona really loves videos but hates long-form text posts, you may decide to focus more heavily on video content rather than text-based posts.
In addition to helping you create content that resonates with your audience, buyer personas can also help inform decisions about which kinds of marketing efforts are most effective for different types of audiences. If you have two different target audiences—one made up of millennials who are active on Twitter and Instagram and another that’s older and more likely to engage with Facebook—you might consider using different advertising campaigns for each group.
How can social media data / social listening help build better personas?
Social media data can help build better buyer personas because it allows a brand to get to know its customers on a deeper level. As people interact with brands online, they’re revealing themselves—their interests, pain points, and preferences—in a way that isn’t possible otherwise.
This information can be used to make more accurate predictions about what customers want and need in the future. It can also be used to create more effective campaigns for connecting with those customers.
Here are five steps using which social listening can help you build better buyer personas:
1. Evaluate your existing audience
Step 1 is to evaluate your existing audience by collecting social media data across your active social networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.).
Leverage a good social media listening tool to determine the attributes of your most engaged followers and characterize them by age, interests, professional title, or industry to better understand how to reach them.
For example, if you’re a luxury brand that targets millennials, you’ll want to know what kind of content they like on Facebook and Instagram so you can better target them in paid ads.
2. Analyze competitors’ audiences
The easiest way to get started with social listening is to find out what your competitors are doing and how they’re doing it by analyzing data from competitors’ channels (and other sources). This can include looking at what content they post on Facebook or Twitter, how they engage with potential customers, whether they use influencers, and more. You can also analyze what people say about your competitors to identify opportunities for improvement or growth in their marketing strategies.
If you’ve never done any market research before, it might seem like a daunting task, but there are tools that make it easy for you to analyze your competition’s data.
One of the most useful free tools is Google Alerts, which allows you to set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases related to your business. For example, if you have an eCommerce store selling women’s clothing, you could set up alerts for things like “women’s clothing” and “trendy women’s fashion.” You’ll get an email anytime someone shares content about those topics on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter.
This allows you to learn more about what kinds of people are interested in your products or services—who buys them? Are they mostly female or male? Do they shop online or in-store? What kinds of articles do they read? By answering these questions, you can start building buyer personas that better reflect the customers who actually buy from you!
Also, good social listening tools allow you to discover everything from engagement trends to message sentiment and audience demographics from your competitor’s data.
3. Discover customer pain points and goals
Social listening is a powerful way to discover what your customers are saying about your business, the products or services you offer, and the competitors they use. It can also help you learn more about their pain points and goals—what they care about most. The more you know about these things, the better equipped you’ll be to develop buyer personas that reflect what customers need and want.
Understand your customers’ real problems and what they want to accomplish with your product or service. You can find this information by listening on social media channels, such as Facebook and Twitter, where your target audience is likely discussing similar topics. You can also use tools like Google Trends or BuzzSumo to see what people are currently interested in and posting about online.
Recording what customers say online can help uncover patterns or trends in their behavior. For example, notice that many of your customers are asking about how to use one of your products in a particular way. It might be an indication that there’s room for improvement in how you present this information.
Or if many of them mention needing help with something related to using the product (such as setting up an account), then it could mean there’s room for improvement in how easy it is for people to access support when they need it.
A good social media listening tool can help you discover all positive and negative brand or product mentions across social media to understand how your customers view your offering and what drives them to buy. The tool also helps you monitor mentions and hashtags, along with monitoring your branded keywords (e.g., brand and product names) on social media. You can even use this tool to monitor your competitors’ branded keywords to compare their public sentiment to yours.
4. Gain insights from customer support
Customer support is a goldmine of information about your customers. It’s also the most accessible source of data for social listening.
Use it as a starting point to learn more about your audience by looking at the types of questions they ask, their interests and concerns, and what they like about your brand. This will help you identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, as well as give you insight into how customers view your product or service.
A lot of customers use social media to voice their concerns. A social media listening tool can help you identify them and respond appropriately—not only do you get feedback on how your product is performing, but it also helps build trust with your customers!
5. Create your buyer persona
Cumulate all the information you’ve gathered in the above steps and use it to create your buyer persona (or multiple personas).
Your marketing and sales teams can use these personas to engage their prospects and customers.
Your marketing team can use your buyer persona(e) to tailor their messaging and marketing materials to appeal specifically to the needs of each persona. They’ll also be able to understand where each persona is in their journey toward becoming a customer, so they can make sure that every piece of content is relevant for that stage in their conversion process.
Your sales team should also use these personas to guide their interactions with prospects—for example, if a salesperson knows that a particular persona has already tried and rejected one of your competitor’s products, then they’ll know not to waste time pitching those products during an initial call with them!
Conclusion
When it comes to business, there’s no substitute for understanding your target market.
Social listening is the best way to understand your target market and ideal customer persona. It helps you create an accurate buyer persona, which in turn leads to better marketing campaigns.
And this is especially true when you’re trying to sell a product or service that isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution and has a specific use case. With the right tool, social listening is easy and affordable.
If you’re looking to improve your marketing campaigns, we highly recommend using Radarr as a social listening tool. It allows you to run social listening in real-time, lets you optimize your buyer personas better, and creates a better understanding of your target audience. This means that you can create better marketing campaigns for your business.
Interested in taking your social media listening capacity to the next level?
