Who’s your social media talking to?
If you want your social media to do more than broadcast to an empty audience it’s a good idea to map out audience personas. Here’s why…
The Covid-19 lockdown has shown us that we are all social creatures at heart and crave human contact. Luckily, social media has helped us to keep in touch ‘virtually’ with friends, family, and the wider world. The businesses that have responded well to Covid-19 really know how to communicate with their customers on social media, and adapt that communication to the situation. They know who they were talking to.
Get personal with audience personas
Truly knowing your customers will help your business cut through the noise and reach your customers on social media. And that’s where audience personas come in. They are fictional representations of your target audience. We’re not just talking about age, gender and location here. This is where you really need to get inside their heads. What motivates them? What are their aspirations and pain points? The only way you can do this properly is to ask them. Don’t base it on what you think they want.
If you are a small business, or focused on a particular niche, you may have a very good idea of who your audiences are and the personas within them. But as your business grows, you’ll have multiple audiences and they’re may be a few personas within each.
It’s important to spend time mapping out your audience personas and asking questions about their pain points, interests and buying behaviour. How you articulate these personas or visualise them is up to you, but it’s important to make them easy to use and understand within your business, and in your brand language.
Test and re-target your content
The worst thing you can do is spend lots of time researching your audience personas to do nothing with them. The real value comes when you test content. The message you use for one persona, may not resonate in the same way for another. By being targeted with your content and doing away with the ‘one size fits all’ mentality you can reach your audiences and increase engagement. You can read more about how that can help your social selling in this post.
Don’t forget consistency
Companies like KFC kept their unique tone of voice throughout the Covid-19 pandemic making it clear that, as they began to re-open stores; ‘It’s just chicken’.
Being consistent with your content and being true to your brand values and also tone of voice, will help you build a relationship with your audience. That’s much more rewarding than broadcasting to empty seats.
