Why Buyer Personas are Vital to the Success of Your Inbound Marketing

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.

 

– – > Free Download: Buyer Persona Worksheet [Access Now]

 

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.

 

Steps to create a buyer persona

Now that you know what a buyer persona is and what it has to do with inbound marketing on social media, the next step is its creation. The characteristics of your business persona should reflect only a select set of specific traits for more efficient targeting. Two or three particular traits are enough, and you can add, reduce, or modify your persona along the way if necessary. Just remember to keep the list of characteristics simple.

To drive your enthusiasm further, you can sketch or download an image of a person that you think represents your ideal customer. It could be that popular persona group: fit moms or even an elderly lady in your neighbourhood, depending on what you are selling and the intended audience. The sketch should also reflect at least some traits of your target market’s demographics, such as age or insecurities about the self. For added effect, give the character a name, whatever you find fit for your persona. This helps make the persona more human and clarifies who specifically are you looking for.

 

Conclusion

That’s it! You have a persona you can “talk” to and serve as your model when you plan out your social media marketing strategy. Just remember, while the persona is an essential part of your social media marketing, it is only but one part of a whole. You need to be creative in choosing, combining, and coordinating all the other elements of your marketing to create a base of loyal followers on social media.

 

If you aren’t sure about who your buyer personas are or you don’t know how to reach them. Give us a call, we’d be happy to guide you through the process!