Customers are obviously what drives brand reputation, and the advent of social media has amplified the voice of all consumers making it mission-critical to ensure every customer interaction exceeds expectations.
With more and more customer experiences and interactions taking place on social media for the world to see, and millions of conversations about brands and products being posted to social channels on a daily basis, social media marketing is proving to be an essential component of every brand’s marketing strategy.
Persona mapping has always been a critical marketing function since it is essential for optimizing and improving customer experiences. With modern consumers generating so much information on social channels every day, social media marketing and persona mapping now go hand-in-hand.
In this article, we’ll cover the details of persona mapping and give you some quick tips on how it can support your brand’s marketing efforts.
What Is Persona Mapping?
Persona mapping is basically the development of distinct profiles for different segments of your target audience. These profiles will reflect the audience's characteristics such as personal attributes, values, motivations, affinities, and behavior.
The profiles are usually created using qualitative research results – for example, you can interview real people about their goals, motivations, and needs. With social media analytics, it’s possible to take a more quantitative and data-driven approach to persona mapping, as these tools can automatically segment your audiences into personas using AI and the trove of data available on social channels.
5 Reasons Persona Mapping Is Important for Your Strategy
So, now that you know what persona mapping is, let’s discuss why it’s important for your social media strategy. Here’s a look at five reasons why it needs to be a part of your overall marketing plan:
1. Persona mapping lets you walk in your customers' shoes
Rather than marketing your products based on published data about what consumers want, buyer personas humanize the target audience. That way, they give marketers a better understanding of consumers' needs, preferences, and behaviors.
This understanding is critical in the development and maintenance of meaningful customer relationships. Consumers will remember you for how you made them feel, and understanding their perspective is the first step in creating content and experiences that resonate.
2. Persona mapping helps you know where to focus
Developing personas helps you identify and segment your audience based on several aspects. Each customer segment remains memorable and distinct since you’ve attributed faces, names, and traits to each group.
Some personas will be more profitable, and others will convert at a higher rate. Having a memorable and humanized visualization of each persona helps you prioritize your resources so you can best serve each customer segment.
Furthermore, you can understand the various social channels that different segments frequent to better understand how to spread your campaigns amongst the different platforms. Of course, distributing identical content among multiple channels isn’t ideal. Instead, take time to tailor each piece to suit its respective target segment and their preferred platform.
3. Persona mapping helps you focus on product development
The humanized audience helps in your product development efforts. You understand each segment's preferences, so you can design solutions that best address every segment's needs.
Your real understanding of the target audience can also bring insights for a more functional product design. The personas help you visualize how well the current product or service serves their needs and identify pitfalls in your brand.
4. Persona mapping enables you to create relevant briefs and social media campaigns
Personas allow marketers to empathize with consumers by walking in their shoes and understanding their feelings in every situation. This way, marketers can devise relevant marketing campaigns, especially on social media. They can focus more on specific product features or use cases that are geared towards different customer segments.
Personas help you remember the type of audience you are addressing so you can create content that resonates with them. Your social media marketing strategy will thrive if you are consistently putting the right content in front of the right audience.
5. Persona mapping helps you deliver a better digital presence
Working on your understanding of consumer needs and behaviors empowers you to create more appealing and useful content. Your creative team can deliver a better digital presence, which will resonate more with audiences and drive more interactions and greater reach.
To make sure you will manage to do that, you need to look for a professional designer to craft more appealing visuals that suit your target audience – different designers can specialize in targeting different demographics, so hiring the right one is important. It will simplify the process and help you find the most suitable candidate.
Are you still wondering if buyer personas are useful? By now, your main priority is probably determining how to create buyer personas.
Segmenting your audience correctly is critical – otherwise you could end up with inaccurate personas that don’t deliver as much value, or even mislead and misinform your marketers. You can create the buyer personas yourself using voice of customer research, or utilize automated solutions that are more data-driven but not as in-depth.
In any case, what matters is the accuracy of the profiles and how you leverage them. Each profile should reveal an authentic and credible customer identity.
The Takeaway
Every business is struggling to get their message across in a flooded market. Every brand’s bucket of potential customers holds different types of people across various demographics – segmenting your potential customers into distinct personas with common traits and affinities will make it easier to create more targeted marketing materials that resonate more with each persona.
It can be difficult to gain actionable insights from a muddled set of arbitrary ad-hoc analyses and qualitative statements, but with accurate persona mapping informing your marketing and social media strategy, your audience becomes lively and distinguishable.
In addition, accurate persona mapping helps you maintain empathy with your customers so you avoid sliding back into generic marketing jargon and truly connect with your audiences.
Editor's Note: This article was originally published on socialbakers.com. Any statistics or statements included in this article were current at the time of original publication.
