Social media marketing begins with two things. Identifying your audience and understanding what they want. A customer profile will help you in this process.
Most social media audiences are naturally sceptical, particularly if they discover a new brand that’s relatively unknown.
As a new business or even a business new to social media, you must work harder to gain and maintain the trust of your audience.
And trust is built through connections and nurturing relationships over time.
It is much easier to develop relationships, make connections and attract a loyal following if you know the needs, wishes, preferences and aspirations of your target audience.
This is why developing a customer profile is so important.
What is a Customer Profile?
A customer profile or buyer persona is a small yet significant component that fits into your overall social media strategy. It plays such a crucial role in everything that you do on social media. It helps to shape and bring greater focus to your social media marketing and wider online strategy.
A customer profile is a detailed representation of your ideal follower and customer. It’s semi-fictional combining real world data with fictional information or ideals.
The finished persona will look similar to a personal profile. It will feature a lot of useful information including traits, habits, preferences and values as well as things such as interests, income and goals.
Essentially you are building a character. Like an author does.
Your customer profile will help you understand the choices that your target follower/customer makes online, how they buy, what they spend and who they interact with.
This is important. It will improve the accuracy of your messages. And it will help you establish deeper connections with your audience.
When you connect, you convert.
The Customer Profile Step by Step
When you think of your ideal customer as a fully developed character – a real person with traits, characteristics and personality, your messaging becomes instantly better.
To get to this stage, there are several steps to follow. The first is research.
Part 1 Information Gathering
At a very basic level, a customer profile will include what is known as demographic and psychographic data.
Demographics tell you who and psychographics tell you why.
Demographics: Background such as job title and education, male/female, age, income, location and goals.
Psychographics: Hobbies and interests, challenges, objections, fears.
Your job, as you piece together the profile is to find out what matters to your ideal customer.
Discover their pain points, needs and wants, what keeps them awake at night and understand problems stopping them from moving forward in their life, work or relationships.
Once you have identified these factors, you can then provide a suitable solution in the form of a product or service that you sell.
As well as exploring why they will buy, also look at the negative thought processes that they go through.
What barriers are in the way? Why won’t they buy?
Also think about platforms.
Where do they spend most of their time, why and which platforms do they visit to find information? If they have a question, where do they go – Facebook, Google or Quora?
What are their values and beliefs – Does your product/service support these or contrast with them?
There are five categories of questions that you can ask to delve deeper into your research and add some weight to your customer profile; who, what, where, why and how.
Who:
- Who is most likely to buy from you?
- Who do they look up to, admire and respect?
- Who do they live, work and spend their free time with?
What:
- What interests, passions, hobbies do they have?
- What challenges do they face in life, work or relationships?
- What are their goals, hopes for the future?
- What content do they consume, social platforms do they use, blogs, books and newspapers do they read?
Where?
- Where does your ideal customer visit the most when they use the internet? Shopping, information, advice, something else?
- Where does your ideal customer find out about new products and services? Email lists, friends and family, adverts etc?
- Where does your ideal customer shop the most? High street brands or independent stores?
Why?
- Why do they like the platforms they do – Engaging content, range of content, ease of use, availability of products and services?
- Why do they buy from the companies they do – customer service, convenience, price?
How?
- How do customers use technology – Are they tech savvy with the latest mobile devices and apps or are they more reliant upon traditional types of technology such as a desktop PC?
- How can your products or services solve the challenges and/or pain points that your ideal customer has?
- How does your product or service address customer needs?
- How does the ideal customer prefer to contact you – through social media DMs, email, telephone, chat?
As you go through each of these questions, always follow your answers with ‘why’. This allows you to understand why people make the choices they do and can give you further insights into how your target customers behave and buy online.
To find answers to these questions you will need to gather a lot of information. If you are an established business with a CRM system filled with customer data, it’s relatively easy to run a few reports and find most of the details you need. However, for start-ups it’s a different story and not as easy. It’s not impossible to craft a strong customer profile for a start-up, it just needs a different approach.
Rather than reviewing internal systems and customer databases to find out about your customers, your focus will be on external data. This can be gathered through:
- Your own surveys – Use social media, run polls and use it as a market research tool.
- Undertake a competitor analysis.
- Visit industry blogs and forums – What topics are being covered frequently and what questions appear over and over again? Review comments to see some of the conversations that are taking place.
- Access websites like Quora, Reddit and read Amazon book or product reviews relevant to your industry.
- Read reviews of products and services in your industry. These can reveal some of the common problems that the product or service helped to solve.
As well as all of the above sources, you can also use your competitors. A competitor analysis is a valuable tool in the research and information gathering process.
Part 2 Competitor Analysis
Competitors are an excellent source of information for start-ups. Spend some time researching the marketplace to find between 5 and 10 competitors that you can evaluate. For each of your competitors use their website, social media pages and their blog if they have one to find out about your ideal customer. The following questions will guide your research and the types of information that you should look to collect:
- What topics/themes do your competitors cover often?
- What questions are being answered or asked frequently?
- Which topics or posts receive the most engagement?
- What problems do customers mention often?
- Who are your competitors targeting?
- What hashtags and/or keywords are they using in their posts and captions?
- What Calls to Action are they using?
- What types of content do they post – audio, video, carousels?
- How often do they post?
- How active are followers on their page? Is there a lot of interaction, is the account growing?
The information gathering process is complete.
You are ready for the next part in the customer profile process.
This is the fun part where you start to assemble your customer profile.
Part 3 Customer Profile Process
Step 1 Evaluate
Take some time to read through all of the data that you have collected. Can you identify any trends or patterns?
Step 2 Common Themes
Next, it might take some time, but carefully analyse the data that you have collected and look for common themes, topics and problems that keep appearing.
Step 3 Define a Problem
With the information that you have, narrow down the focus to a handful of challenges and see if any of them are a good fit for your business, your products or services.
Step 4 Writing the Customer Profile
As your customer profile starts to take shape, be creative, give the persona a name, describe their background, their values, likes, dislikes and so on. The more detailed you are, the more impact your messaging will have when you are creating posts and engaging with followers.
Include the following sections:
- Name
- Age
- Job Title
- Income
- Interests
- Favourite social media platforms
- Aspirations
- Challenges or problem
Step 5 Goals
The final step in the process is to consider how your customer profile fits in with your wider business goals and objectives. What types of content can you create that can solve their challenges, provide solutions and create a connection while also boosting conversions? What drives purchase decisions, how do you get from follower to customer, and do they have the buying power to make the purchasing decision or are their decisions influenced by someone else such as a manager for a B2B persona?
Now that you have your fully crafted customer profile, make sure that all of your messaging is written to them and with them in mind.
The final phase is to use the data you have to start distributing tailored messages on social platforms that will connect with and help your ideal customer.
Part 4 Building Communities
While a growing follower count is great, it’s important to attract people to your page who want to become part of your tribe, who are as interested in your industry as much as you are and who show the same level of enthusiasm and excitement about your products and services that you do. Remember that the number of followers you have doesn’t always reflect success. It’s much better to have a smaller, more targeted group of followers who are likely to buy, than thousands of followers who don’t engage with your content and who will never convert.
Building a community of likeminded individuals requires an understanding of your target audience, (which you should have if you’ve reached this point), along with a willingness to invest time and effort in the process.
Community Development will include the following:
Communication – If followers are to relate, you need to communicate. Make it easy for people to chat to you, start conversations, run Q&A sessions, ask questions, share user stories, encourage followers to share their story of using your product or service. Give your followers an opportunity to interact with your business.
Value – Start with problems and solve them. In every industry there are many, many problems. Find out what they are and give value by offering your audience a quick win, something that they can try to achieve a result. How can you add value to their life? Value means different things to different people, so think about what your buyer persona would find helpful or valuable and offer that.
Give – Use giveaways, increase awareness, boost engagement or reward top contributors.
UGC – Encourage community participation, multi-image posts of UGC.
Be You – Share your story, show your personality, tell your followers who you are, what you do, your values, create an emotional connection and be unique, relatable, funny or memorable.
Growth – Connect and collaborate with other accounts that complement your brand. If you find accounts with an audience who would find your product or service useful, engage with their posts, participate in conversations that they are having and start collaborations.
Influencers – Get involved with influencers to grow your page, use micro influencers.
There are lots of ways that you can build your own unique online community through social media. It’s an opportunity for you to show how you are different from your competitors and most importantly, how you can provide products, services and solutions that serve a loyal following of happy customers and long term brand advocates.
Regardless of the social platform you use or content type you create, every time you post something new, always have your customer profile in mind. It will have such a positive impact. Not only will you see an increase in engagement and organic growth, but over time, it will boost conversions too.