As a small business entrepreneur, you’ve probably witnessed the impact of having a social media account on a business. In your personal social media account, it is evident in your timeline or feed that businesses – small or large – are willing to spend to gain interaction with their customers.
Social Media has evolved from just a platform for social networking to an essential medium to build one’s business. Now that a significant fraction of society uses social media, small businesses are finding unconventional ways to reach and interact with their customers.
Setting up a social media account has become a part of the business process for many businesses. Moreover, one can ditch the traditional brick and mortar shop and solely transact or communicate with potential customers online.
With our social media accounts flooded by different ads from multiple businesses, it is surprising that 24% of small businesses do not have any social media presence.
One key reason why many businesses are building an online presence is to promote and market their products and services to social media users. Social Media has become an exceptional tool to target your customer niche. Social Media platforms have become powerful and effective especially in a marketing aspect because it holds a large number of people that are constantly interacting.
The continuous increase in the number of users on social media platforms paved way for the emergence of social media marketing. Social media marketing allowed businesses to build a direct relationship with their customers.
Social media marketing can be a powerful tool to boost your small business’ sales and increase your brand presence. However, it can be tricky and costly without a good understanding of how it works.
In traditional media marketing, understanding your customers is also the key to effective Social media marketing. It is essential that as a small business owner you need to know your target customer. Otherwise, you’ll only be wasting your resources on a marketing campaign that does not reach its intended audience.
Identifying a customer persona is a prerequisite to most social media campaigns. As reiterated earlier, social media marketing can become costly if you make it for everyone. Having a broad campaign will not resonate any message to your customers. A broad campaign defeats the purpose of marketing. The main reason why businesses are spending hundreds of dollars in marketing is to close a sale. A message that does not reach your customers will never become a sale.
A customer persona is the building block of social media marketing. If you are not yet convinced, here are the benefits of creating a customer persona for your small business.
1. Provides you direction
As a small business, it is typical that you only have a handful of talents helping in operating your business. With the user-friendly interface of the social media platforms, promoting your social media marketing campaign can be done by any of your team members. However, creating the social media marketing campaign itself is not as easy as promoting it. Many people tend to get stuck in the step of generating ideas for the campaign. With the array of options and ideas available, many find themselves having difficulty narrowing the said ideas.
With a customer persona, the talent assigned to create the social media marketing campaign will have a clear direction. The customer persona represents your target customer. The characteristics of your customer persona, such as their age, could help you set the tone of your campaign message. It would help with assessing the social media platform that is the most used by your target customer. The pain points you’ve established dictates the direction of your social media campaign. The message of your campaign should align with how your product and service will solve the pain points raised by your target customers.
2. Saves you money
A social media marketing campaign that does not generate a sale is an incurred cost. Understanding the characteristics of your customer persona helps in narrowing the scope of your promotion to only its target audience. The pay-per-click advertising model is one of the most common and effective models in digital marketing.
If you don’t set the parameters of your campaign to its target audience, those clicks in your ad will never translate into a sale of your product or service because the message of your campaign does not help them in any way to solve the problem they currently have.
Social media marketing for a target audience lessens the marketing cost over time. Social media ads manager generates data about your target audience and marketing campaign over time. With such data, you’ll be able to update your social media marketing campaign effectively.
3. Allows you to maximize social media ads manager features
The customer persona will serve as a guide in your marketing strategy. It also allows you to create an effective campaign unconventionally. One outstanding feature of the ads manager of Facebook is the option to promote social media marketing campaigns to those with an upcoming birthday. It can be said that most people tend to spend on their birthday. By incorporating characteristics – age, geographical locations, gender,
Occupation, stage in life – of your target audience from your customer persona to your Facebook ad campaign, you’ll be able to increase the opportunity of your social media marketing campaign to generate a sale.
4. Product Development
Customer Persona is not only beneficial in social media marketing campaigns. Having a clear illustration of a representation of your target customer can help you in product development decision-making. The characteristics of your customer persona may be a good reference in deciding on the product and packaging design. On the other hand, the pain points can be utilized to separate your product or service from its competitors.
