A buyer persona is a research-based profile of your ideal customer. Building a buyer persona involves defining your target customer’s needs, pain points, purchase triggers, and demographic details, amongst other information. Outlining this at the outset helps create a refined marketing strategy and paves the way for easy and accurate targeting.
With social media playing a prominent role in the B2B marketing process today, go beyond the basics. Make your buyer persona more informative by also defining the best-fit social media platforms. This is a sound approach as you can’t stand out on every possible social media platform available, and neither should you pick them at random.
If you’re wondering how to map which social media platforms work for your buyer persona, follow these steps.
Step 1: Define your business goals
The first step will always be defining your business goals pertaining to social media. Determine whether you want to create awareness, understand wants and needs more deeply, build a community of engaged individuals, and so on.
Once you have a list of goals, start assessing platforms based on whether or not they fit the bill. For each platform, appraise how well the features that are available will help you with furthering your objectives. Also, look into how competitors, who have a shared audience, are using social media to get a better understanding of your options.
Step 2: Understand how your audience uses social media
Next, sort through social networking sites based on how well they match your buyer persona. For example, if your target audience is young professionals with less than 5 years of experience, in the age group of 25-30, then you will want to consider Instagram as part of your mix. On the other hand, if you are targeting entrepreneurs between the ages of 25-34, then Twitter is the social media platform for you. Facebook is the largest social networking site with over 2.8 billion monthly active users (as of the second quarter of 2021). However, it is typically considered to be a great platform for B2C businesses and not so much for B2B entities. Lastly, if your ideal buyer is a C-level executive, B2B decision-maker or senior-level influencer, LinkedIn should definitely be your top priority.
Step 3: Assess your offerings and capabilities
At this stage, ask yourself:
- How do your products and services add value to your customers’ business?
- How do you plan to engage with your customers?
- What type of content can you produce?
- How often can you realistically post?
If you are able to get concrete answers for each of them, then your business will be one step closer to picking the right social media platforms for your buyer persona. Alternatively, if you fail to get a concrete answer, then go back to steps 1 and 2 and reanalyze to gain clarity.
Once you select the right platforms with the help of these three steps, follow the next two that focus on execution! After all, selecting the right platforms is half the battle won, but what you do next will determine just how many of those business goals you’ll be able to achieve.
Create a unique voice
Now that you know which platforms you’re going to post on, pay attention to how and what you should say. To define this, go back to analyzing the manner in which your buyer persona interacts with social media content, and also how your competitors are addressing their ideal buyers. Then, spend time on:
- Creating a tonality that reflects your organization’s personality and what you stand for
- Refine this based on what your buyer persona is looking for
Balance being consistent across platforms and making small tweaks to blend in with a particular platform’s tonality
Define content type
Next, detail the type of content that you will focus on for each of your chosen social networking sites. Remember, every site is different and so are the people on it. So, create a handbook based on what kind of content appeals to your buyer persona on each platform. Factor in different formats such as images, videos, polls, infographics, live video/audio streams, links to eBooks and long-form content, etc. Also, set guidelines for captions and hashtags so that your content is easy to consume, as well as easy to find for your ideal customer.
As you now know, social media can be a great ally, but only if you immerse yourself in it, and post and engage consistently. Else, it will not generate the impact that you have in mind. This means committing to it wholeheartedly, staying up-to-date on evolving social media trends, and also keeping an eye on your strategy, refining it periodically. As this is a constant, hands-on undertaking, it’s a smart move to partner with Resolute B2B for social media marketing services. We take care of all aspects of social media so that you can get the best results. Check our website today for more details.
