4 Ways To Create Buyer Personas With Social Media Data

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on data and research.

They help you focus your time on qualified prospects, guide product development to better suit the needs of your target customers, and align all work across your organization (from marketing to sales to service). This results in developing a successful product or service.

Personas help you to understand your customers (and prospective customers) better.

Making your content, messaging, product development, and services specific to the needs, behaviors, and concerns of your target audience makes it easier for you to tailor these things to them.

Many companies have buyer personas with similar categories, such as a marketer, an HR rep, or an IT manager.

The number of personas your business has will be based on who your target audience includes and what you offer your customers.

Now that you know how to create buyer personas, are you ready to get started?

How to create buyer personas

Creating buyer personas requires research, surveys, and interviews with a mixture of customers, prospects, and people who align with your target audience but are not in your contacts database.

Here are some practical methods for gathering the information you need to develop personas:

• Look at your contacts database to see any trends about how certain leads or customers find and consume your content.
• When creating forms for your website, be sure to include form fields that capture important persona information. For example, if your personas vary based on company size, make sure to include a field on your form that asks for this information.
• What can your sales team tell you about the leads they are interacting with the most? What generalizations can they make about the different types of customers you serve best?
• Interview customers and prospects to discover what they like about your product or service.

Now that you have read the above research, how can you use it to create your personas?

When you have completed your research, you will have a lot of valuable and relevant information about your potential and current customers.

What do you do with all of the information you have gathered? How do you make it easy for everyone to understand?

Use the answers from your interview questions to identify patterns and commonalities, develop at least one primary persona, and share that persona with the company.

Organize the information you have gathered about your persona(s) by using our free, downloadable persona template.

Share the slides with the company so that everyone can develop a better understanding of the target audience.

The following is a more detailed explanation of how to create your buyer personas.

1. Fill in your persona’s basic demographic information

Questions about age, gender, income, education, and race can be asked in order to get a better understanding of the respondent.

When developing your persona, it can be helpful to include some descriptive buzzwords and mannerisms that you may have picked up on during your conversations. This will make it easier for people on your team to identify certain personas when they’re talking to prospects.

Name

While it might seem like an overstretch to give your best potential customer a name, it actually makes all the difference when thinking of your buyers as real people.

When you give your buyer persona a name and create a profile for them, they become more than a list of statistics and attributes. You start to think of them as real people with specific needs and motivations.

You can give the person a nickname to better describe their interests and pains. For example, “Squeakers” might be your gym rat who loves to talk about their personal bests.

It is much better to describe someone as “Dave the Tech Geek” than to describe them as “a male in mid-30s who is interested in technology.”

When you are trying to decide on a name for your new business, you might look at a list of popular names, interviews you have done, or personal associations.

Some marketers prefer to assign common, generic names to their buyer personas while others favor alliterations and plosives. Choose whatever feels right to you and avoid using celebrity or famous fictional character names to prevent confusion and confusing associations.

Age and gender

Age and gender are the most important pieces of data used to create an audience persona.

Social media analytics is a smooth way of gathering data from demos and interviews.

There are a few different ways that you can collect age and gender data, but they all involve choosing an audience to study and fetching analytics based on the users’ ongoing social media activity.

A social listening tool helps you monitor your brand name, campaign hashtag, or any other keyword that links to your audience.

After you have inputted all the keywords and sources you want to monitor, the social data analytics will be presented to you in a dashboard.

Location and languages

It is important to know where your ideal buyer is located and what languages they speak when creating a buyer persona.

In order to get the best data regarding demographics, it is recommended to use social media analytics tools. This is because they provide information based on real users and allow you to create buyer persona choices that are supported by your actual audience.

Instead of using Google Analytics, you could get locations and languages data, as well as other user data.

Geo insights in the form of languages and locations can be found by looking at Audience reports. This information can be used to complete customer personas with further demographic information.

Additionally, you can choose to concentrate your analysis on a specific country, region, or city to see if your customer personas are present in that area.

Job title

It’s important to include occupation as an attribute in your user personas, especially if you’re working with B2B companies.

It’s obviously important to know your client’s job title if you’re trying to find B2B customers, since it allows you to make a more relevant offer. However, even for B2C businesses, this information is still relevant. Knowing things like how your customers commute and what worries them during the day can help you better imagine their lifestyle.

2. Share what you’ve learned about your persona’s motivations

How do they want to be perceived by others, and what motivates them to keep going? The information you learned from asking “why” during those interviews will be distilled here. What are the things that keep your persona up at night? Who do they want to be? How do they want to be perceived by others, and what motivates them to keep going?

The most important thing is to show people how your company can help them.

Spending patterns

A spending pattern is a set of behaviors related to spending money, expressed in terms of a currency.

It’s important to understand what resources and expenditures a buyer persona is used to when defining it.

In order to figure out what kind of spending patterns people have, you can either use a spending calculator or look at household expenditure statistics.

Alternatively, you could spend time thinking about your ideal customer’s daily routine, with a special focus on what kinds of purchases they make, and how much room there is in their life for products similar to yours.

The way people spend money can also be determined by looking at the items they buy on your website or through your product, so don’t hesitate to use your CRM data for this purpose.

Goals

Your target audience’s goals and aspirations are the positive changes they want to achieve.

Your goals don’t have to be directly related to the solutions you can provide.

If you find that your proposal is more advantageous to your customers than what they originally wanted, try convincing them of that.

Social listening is a way to track and analyze online conversations in order to better understand what people are saying about a certain topic. It can be useful for research purposes, or for monitoring and responding to customer feedback.

Sales teams usually have a lot of contact with customers and can therefore be a good source of information about what customers want or what their goals are.

Interests

One of the defining characteristics of a buyer persona is their interests. This can include everything from what kind of music they like to what TV shows they watch. By understanding the interests of your buyer persona, you can better craft content and messaging that will resonate with them.

If you want to know what people are saying about a particular person or thing, you can look at demos and interviews, or use social media listening and analytics software like Brandwatch.

The text is discussing how the audience insights delivered by the platform can be used to research your perfect buyers with minimum effort.

3. Help your sales team prepare for conversations with your persona

Providing a sales team with potential objections like the ones shown here can be very helpful.

“Our personas are very concerned about their privacy and do not want their personal information to be shared with other people or companies. They are also worried about being able to control their own data and how it is used. They want to be able to trust the companies they give their data to and feel confident that their data is safe.” “I don’t want my personal information shared with anyone else. I want to be able to trust the companies I give my data to.” “I’m worried about companies being able to use my data in ways I don’t agree with. I want to be able to control my own data.”

The prospect might raise objections during the conversation, so the sales team should be prepared to address those objections.

Pain points

Pain points are the psychological characteristics that help marketers understand customers’ motivations in relation to particular products.

Even though it is trickier to study psychological characteristics through face-to-face interviews, questionnaires, and opinion polls are still used in order to gain information about them.

Sentiment analysis and the Topic Cloud are powerful means of researching the attitudes, concerns, and aspirations within an audience.

You can figure out your customer persona’s pain points by experimenting with Awario’s audience analysis tools, or by trying other similar tools.

You can also find this information by talking to your customer support team. They are always getting questions from customers based on their needs. So you can ask for a FAQ that represents questions from your buyer persona.

Challenges and fears

The psychological characteristics of a customer persona that explain what stops them from purchasing are called challenges and fears.

The reason can be anything from the price to the doubts about its necessity.

There are certain things that can make or break a sale. By identifying what these are, you can learn how to address and deal with them in your marketing and sales activities.

Behavioral characteristics

The behavioral characteristics of a buyer persona show patterns of behavior that are important to the marketing process you are creating.

One technique that marketers use to understand the behavior of their ideal customers is to create a “day-in-the-life” profile.

A buyer persona is a representation of your ideal customer, based on market research and real data about your existing customers. As the name suggests, a buyer persona’s purpose is to describe a daily sequence of events and activities your buyer persona would go through, therefore establishing how your products or services could be of use to them.

The online behaviors of consumers are valuable to marketers at any stage of campaign development.

What are some of the questions that set the direction here?

The more data you can collect on customer behavior, the better you will be able to understand your ideal customers.

You can use what you have learned to improve the way you target, connect with, and communicate with your customers.

4. Craft messaging for your persona

How you talk about your products and services to your persona can have a big impact on how well they sell. If you can come up with creative and compelling ways to describe what you offer, you’ll be more likely to pique people’s interest and get them to buy from you. Here are some tips:

– Use positive and enthusiastic language that showcases your products/services in the best light.

– Be clear and concise in your descriptions, so that people know exactly what they’re getting.

– Use persuasive language to convince people that your products/services are worth their money.

– Highlight the unique selling points of your products/services so that people can see why they’re better than the competition.

This includes the specific language you should use, as well as a more general explanation that positions your solution in a way that makes sense to your persona.

It is important that all employees use the same language when talking to leads and customers so that communication is effective.

How can buyer personas be used in marketing?

The development of personas allows you to produce content and messaging that is tailored to your target audience.

You can use this tool to target specific parts of your audience with personalized marketing.

By segmenting your audience, you can send different types of lead nurturing emails to different groups based on what you know about them. This allows you to tailor your messaging to each group, making your communications more relevant and likely to convert.

Additionally, you can use buyer personas in combination with lifecycle stage to map out and create content that is narrowly targeted. (You can find out more about how to do this by downloading our Content Mapping Template.)

If you create negative personas in addition to positive personas, you’ll be able to segment out the people who are unlikely to be interested in your product from the rest of your contacts. This can help you reduce your cost-per-lead and cost-per-customer, and see higher sales productivity.

Create your buyer personas

To learn more about your target customers and how best to target, support, and work with them, create buyer personas. This way, everyone on your team will be on the same page.

If you improve your reach, you will also likely boost the number of conversions and increase loyalty.