Are you an entrepreneur or online marketer with an ineffective or unproductive social media marketing campaign?
You can start generating leads today on social media if you simply take the time to understand why your ideal clients need your products/services. What are their needs, challenges, and pain points on their current journey?
How do you know what’s actually important to your clients?
…because it’s easy to think like your client when you create a buyer persona!
How This Immediately Improves Your Game
- Identifies who brings in 80% of your profits. Be intentional. Use what they care about to inform all of your marketing efforts.
- Gets you into your client’s existing online conversations via effective hashtags & SEO optimization.
- Informs custom-content based on exactly what your client values
Recommendation: Create a Facebook LIVE series based on your top clients’ questions before closing!
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #1: Brainstorm Based on Pareto’s 80/20 Rule
Brainstorming is the starting point for any strategy. And, in order to understand what your ideal client cares about, you need to determine the 20% of your target audience that is producing 80% of your profits.
Chances are you will be shocked to learn that only a handful of customers or partnerships create 80% of your profits! Thank you, Tim Ferriss! Maybe you will find that their spending is focused on only one of your products or services. This is the 80/20 rule in action within your business.
So how do you target only the interests of your most profitable relationships without alienating your existing core demographics?
Here are some tips:
Brainstorm actual top client transactions. It is easier to start your brainstorm with actual client examples. Write down the stories of the clients who were the easiest and most profitable. Why? Because that’s the real core persona you want to identify in your PDF template.
Look for what your top clients have in common. Are there any commonalities? Can you find some common themes like a connection to the armed forces, or a recent life change, or a shared source of inspiration? What is the “bigger story” shared in these case studies? These commonalities may reveal something much larger that was waiting to be discovered.
Identify ways to connect this to your core demographic. You don’t have to curate and create content based solely on what your top clients find interesting/challenging. Instead, look for how these interests overlap with ‘the common journey.’
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #2: Download your Buyer Persona
At 333 Social Media, we find that the Buyer Persona is so critically important to the social media strategies of our clients that we put it right on the homepage at 333SocialMedia.com.
The Buyer Persona makes it easy to capture your clients’:
- Challenges & Pain Points
- Goals & Values
- Information Sources
- Aversions To Purchasing
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #3: Determine Buyer Persona Based on Client Case Studies
By now you should have downloaded the 333 Buyer Persona PDF. Please print it out now or have it open on your screen before continuing!
Giving your buyer persona a name and gender is the quickest way to make you think like your top clients! Fill in the demographics from the top client brainstorm you completed in Step #1. Give your buyer persona a name, a face, and a specific identity with tailored needs.
Yes, you should also have a general target audience for your general marketing efforts. But, in addition to that, you also need a buyer persona prepared for each service or product you’re offering.
When completing your top clients’ characteristics, outlined in Step #2, try to base your responses on actual case studies as much as possible.
Be specific, because it’s relatively easy to figure out what an individual cares about. However, you’ll get lost in the weeds if you try to determine what general populations want with questions like, “What do 25 to 35-year-olds in the United States care about?” You’re going to have an even harder time creating content or finding the trends that will resonate with that entire demographic.
This is your cheat sheet.
Even when you are about to write a social media post, look at your completed buyer persona!
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #4: Start Filling Out The Goals First!
Set yourself up for success by completing your buyer persona’s goals first! Their goals will be tied loosely to the product or service they purchased. This is the easy part!
You will use the goals to spin-out the challenges, pain points, and values.
Here are a few examples:
Challenges: Why haven’t reached their goals? What are they currently doing to prepare for their ultimate goals?
Pain Points: Where does your client feel their pain the most? Missing time with their family? Limited Budget?
HINT: This is the internal trigger for the external challenges brainstormed above.
Sources of Information: Who are people that want to reach this goal paying attention to? What influencers are important to my client? How does my client prefer to receive her information?
Aversion to The Purchase Process: Think back to one of the top clients that decided not to purchase your product/service. What were their concerns? What questions were they asking? What were they afraid of happening?
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #5: Get A Reality Check With Top Client Feedback
Now, this is where the rubber meets the road. Think of how you can reward a top client for his/her feedback on your completed buyer persona. This is important!
Meet with one of your top clients to go over your hypothesis about their needs. Doing this can save you thousands of dollars on hyper-targeted Facebook Ads by fine-tuning the powerful tool you’ve created.
Now you can upgrade your buyer persona from a mere hypothesis to actual facts about your client’s needs!
The best practice is to think of the client that you would like to replicate and put that person into your buyer persona. Be precise about what they care about. Then interview that person to make sure you got it right.
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #6: Use Client Interests To Create Month Themes to Create & Curate Content
Month themes make your strategy more effective by getting all of your efforts going in the same direction.
Create one month theme based on the challenges of your buyer persona and fill in some of the specific variables of your marketing campaign.
Here are a few examples:
- Targeting moms?! Repost other people’s content in-line with the needs of a single mom. Boost your post to people who are single moms, and then, when the single moms come back to your facebook page and see that custom content geared towards them, they’ll see that you have reposted content that positions you as a thought leader. Now you have demonstrated that you understand their unique challenges! And it creates trust.
- Targeting Parents of special needs children to purchase a children’s book? No problem! Create month themes around what the parents already care about: creativity of their child or parenting tips. Focus on giving tips on how to coach a creative child and how to bring that creativity out of him/her. Now, that’s your month theme. Now, you can just start re-posting those articles based on their challenges.
In addition to re-posting related content, you can use month themes to select which groups you should be active in related that target audience.
That’s how you select month themes based on the challenges of your buyer persona!
Month themes naturally deepen your relationship with your audience by getting you to align all of your efforts with your client’s needs. It creates a bond that you don’t even have to be present for, just your consistency and tangentiality through month themes. Use month themes as a shortcut approach that makes you even more effective and creates a synergy in your monthly content that positions you as a thought leader in the topics that are the most important to your top clients!
HOW TO THINK LIKE YOUR CUSTOMER STEP #7: Use LIVE Social Networking Where Your Clients Are Already Hanging Out
Brainstorm where your clients are hanging out online, and then, leverage live social networking in those places. Leverage the circle in your 333 Buyer Persona to identify what sources of information are important to your top clients (i.e. which books, blogs, websites, TV, industry experts?!).
Why should you target the sources of information your top clients are already consuming? Because social media is changing; it’s not just likes, shares, and retweets. Now, it’s about getting into existing conversations.
So how do you get into existing conversations?
- Pay money (i.e. boosted posts & hyper-targeted ads)
- Use hashtags (not recommended for Facebook!)
- Repost content about what is important to your top clients.
That means, if you are targeting single mom’s, maybe you should be re-posting articles from M Magazine, Oprah’s Book Club, or the local recreation center for your target area. Right?
Figure out which influencers are already reaching your top clients… and then target them for LIVE Social Networking (i.e. ‘like’, ‘comment’, and ‘share’ their posts). Show your client you care about the same things they care about so that you become a thought leader in your industry!
BONUS: You will also get in front of all the followers of the influencer you’re reposting (especially when they give you a shout-out back). Make sure to ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on any of the influencer’s responses to keep the conversation going!
CONCLUSION
Social media is changing! Social media is not just in cyberspace somewhere. Now, more than ever, social media is the driving sales force for your business. And the best part is that you have a tool that allows you to hyper-target content, conversation and ads to your top clients (and your prospective clients!).
You are completely in control! So be intention: fill out your 333 Buyer Persona so you can create, ‘like’, and you ‘share’, content that your top clients see as important!
As you demonstrate your expertise based on these 7 steps you will form real relationships with your top clients and real partnerships with influencers important to your top clients.
Make sure to DOWNLOAD – 333 Buyer Persona so you can intentionally create real-time relationships online with the people who matter the most to your business.
Note: This is a guest post. If you have any issues with any of the articles posted at www.marktechpost.com please contact at asif@marktechpost.com
Crystal Lindsey, MBA is an industry leading social media expert, graduate professor, Fortune 500 professional public speaker, and entrepreneur. Crystal speaks at statewide real estate expos where she helps real estate agent learn how to harness the power of LIVE Video and LIVE Social Networking. #BeSocial! #SocialMediaAddict
