Published: 2026-04-09 · Inbound Marketing · Ricky Bandelin
Many years have passed since organic traffic, and sheer luck produced a following for businesses on social media platforms. Skills and strategy now play a role, especially as competition for customer attention increases. Although an inbound marketing strategy is a go-to approach for most social media marketers these days, driving traffic is not enough. Building a base of followers on social media is equally essential.
Using inbound marketing to build a base of followers
Inbound marketing generates traffic since it provides free and immediate value to its target audience, which usually comes in the form of information or entertainment. By demonstrating this value early, you're able to develop a sense of trust, loyalty, and interest within your target market that makes them more amenable to buying your product or service. Small and medium sized businesses can leverage inbound marketing in a cost efficient way to get in front of their ideal buyer. If the message is shared with the masses and is more broad in nature, the inbound marketing strategy may miss the target in achieving the results you are looking for. The challenge becomes ensuring that your audiences not only become potential leads and actual buyers but also devoted followers as well.
Start by defining a buyer persona
A buyer persona is the kind of ideal customer you want to have. You will use your buyer persona to compare it with your business objectives and to the demographics of your target audience. In the process, you get to identify the gaps that you need to fill in your social media marketing efforts to gain awareness and consolidate your reputation online. You also get to compare your inbound marketing strategy with your competitors. Thus, buyer personas are an essential prerequisite of social media marketing as much as knowing your audience and setting your business' purpose. All the efforts of your marketing, social media, production, and other teams could then be mobilized to build the ideal customer who will follow you on social media and bring more followers for you, for free.
How marketing uses buyer personas
Buyer personas play a role in every stage of your marketing process. The buyer persona would influence the trust and essence of your content, advertising, SEO efforts, and social media engagement. For social media, in particular, the buyer persona would guide you on the appropriate platforms to use for your brand, the phasing, and scheduling of your content creation and releases on social media, and your strategy for directly engaging with your audiences. It also helps create audiences for any paid marketing that you're doing as well.
As the word persona already suggests, you want your brand to act as a person in social media where people can build a relationship with it, a relationship that you can deepen. With a base of loyal followers on social media, you can have a group of people who are more likely to visit your site more often, especially if they become a loyal follower. This repeat traffic can help build SEO over time as the more traffic coming to your website, the stronger your website authority gets. However, you can only sustain this relationship for as long as you provide relevant and quality content to your audiences, and you are consciously and subtly sculpting their psychology to match your buyer persona.